ROBERT LOUIS 
STEVENSON 



BY 

L. COPE CORNFORD 
M 



NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1900 



TWO COPIES RECfilVEO, 



^^^'('^ 



IJbrarf of C^omgfM^ a ^^ 
©fUcn &i the .'^ ^ti 



Copyright, 1899 
By Dodd, Mead and Company 



A II rights reserved 



2antbersttg ^rrss 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 






PREFACE. 

As I have always been an eager student of 
Robert Louis Stevenson's work, so it was with 
peculiar pleasure that I entered upon the study 
of his finished achievement, and of his person- 
ality and temperament as expressed in that 
achievement. For, such were the terms of my 
ambition: and they may serve (at least) to 
define the limits of this essay. Beyond those 
limits it was not mine to adventure. That Mr 
Sidney Colvin has in preparation the authorised 
biography of Stevenson, is matter of common 
knowledge; and this consideration naturally 
prevented me from recording aught of the 
main facts of Stevenson's career, that has not 
been made public property already; and, for 
the same reason, I have abstained from making 
any use of the series of Stevenson's Letters 
which have recently been published in a monthly 
magazine. 



VI PREFACE. 

With the name of Robert Louis Stevenson 
is indissolubly connected the name of William 
Ernest Henley: and I delight to acknowledge, 
with the liveliest gratitude, the help which Mr 
Henley has given me in the making of this 
essay towards a just appreciation of his old 
comrade. And to John William Simpson, my 
old master in a noble and difficult art, I would 
render thanks for the service he did me in sign 
of our common admiration for Stevenson, the 
artist. 

L. COPE CORNFORD. 



OviNGDEAN Grange, 
near Brighton, September, 1899. 



CONTENTS. 

Pack 

I. Prologue: His Heritage i 

II. His Ancestry 13 

III. Outline of His Life 27 

IV. The Moralist 79 

V. The Artist 107 

VI. The Romantic 115 

VII. The Novelist 149 

VIII. The Limner of Landscape 166 

IX. His Style 184 

X. Epilogue 195 

INDEX 199 



APPARITION. 

Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably^ 

Neat-footed and weak-fingered : in his face — 

Lean, large-botied, curved of beak, and touched with race^ 

Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, 

The brown eyes radiant with vivacity — 

There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, 

A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace 

Of passion and impudence and energy. 

Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, 

Most vain, most generous, sternly critical. 

Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist : 

A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, 

Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all. 

And something of the Shorter-Catechist. 

W. E. Henley, Rhymes and Rhythms. 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 



I. 

PROLOGUE: HIS HERITAGE. 

Do you remember — can we e'er forget? — 

How, in the coiled perplexities of youth, 

In our wild climate, in our scowling town, 

We gloomed and shivered, sorrowed, sobbed, and feared ? 

The belching winter wind, the missile rain, 

The rare and welcome silence of the snows. 

The laggard mom, the haggard day, the night. 

The grimy spell of the nocturnal town, 

Do you remember ? — Ah, could one forget t 

— R. L. S., To my Familiars. 

When Robert Louis Stevenson, some five-and- 
twenty years since, went to and fro to his studies 
in the University of that city which was his 
birthplace and his home, and which always re- 
mained to him as the image of " the dear city of 
Zeus," the old Scots order, giving place to the 
new, was even then suffering the last processes 

I 



2 R. L. STEVENSON. 

of dissolution. In what the old order consisted, 
in ancient Edina, a " city of clubs and talk and 
good-fellowship, a city of harlotry and high jinks, 
a city (above all) of drink," ^ it is hard for an 
Englishman rightly to comprehend. It is odds 
but he will never attain to a true conception of 
the old society; he must content himself with 
mere hints and adumbrations. Let us turn, for 
instance, to Sir Walter's discreetly ^ jovial pages. 
When Colonel Mannering went seeking Mr 
Pleydell the advocate in Edinburgh, his con- 
ductor, the Highland chairman, " suddenly 
dived with him into a very steep paved lane. 
Turning to the right, they entered a scale stair- 
case, as it is called, the state of which, so far as 
it could be judged of by one of his senses, 
annoyed Mannering's delicacy not a little." It 
was up this wynd, atop of this foul scale stair- 
case, that the prosperous advocate had his dwell- 
ing. But it was Saturday at e'en; and, says the 
chairman, " His honour will be at Clerihugh's 
about this time — Hersel could hae tell'd ye that, 
but she thought ye wanted to see his house." 
So to Clerihugh's they go accordingly, together 

1 W. E. Henley, Essay on Robert Burns, <5^f. 

' " Discreetly " : I use the word advisedly ; for, it was for just 
such a club as that which Mr Paulas Pleydell presided, that 
Burns made the famous collection of sculduddery which is known 
as The Merry Muses of Caledonia. 



PROLOGUE: HIS HERITAGE. 3 

with the great Dandle Dinmont, who "divided 
the press, shouldering from him, by the mere 
weight and impetus of his motion, both drunk 
and sober passengers." The causeway, you 
observe, is thronged with brither Scots in their 
accustomed Saturday-at-e'en altitudes. The 
party turns "into a dark alley — then up a 
dark stair — and then into an open door . . . 
Mannering looked around him, and could hardly 
conceive how a gentleman of a liberal profession 
and good society should choose such a scene for 
social indulgence . . . The passage in which 
they stood had a window to the close, which 
admitted a little light during the daytime, and 
a villanous compound of smells at all times, but 
more especially towards evening." The tavern, 
in fact, owns premises even more disreputable 
than the private flat in the " land." And here 
" men and women, half undressed, were busied 
in baking, broiling, roasting oysters, and pre- 
paring devils on the gridiron ; " while, in the 
next room, Mr Counsellor Pleydell and his fel- 
low-counsellors, highly flushed with claret and 
brandy, were rioting at " the ancient and now 
forgotten pastime of High Jinks . . . Mr 
Counsellor Pleydell, such as we have described 
him, was enthroned, as a monarch, in an elbow- 
chair placed on the dining-table, his scratch-wig 



4 R. L. STEVENSON. 

on one side, his head crowned with a bottle-slider, 
his eye leering with an expression betwixt fun 
and the effects of wine, while his court around 
him resounded with such crambo scraps of verse 
as these : — 

' Where is Gerunto now ? and what's become of him ? 
Gerunto's drowned because he could not swim, &c., &c.' 

Such, O Themis," adds Sir Walter, "v/ere 
anciently the sports of thy Scottish children ! " 
Liquor and letters, in fact, but especially liquor. 

I have quoted the incident^ somewhat at 
length, because it seems to me entirely typical. 
And observe, that upon the entrance of the 
visitors, it is the visitors who are dismayed. 
Mr Pleydell does, indeed, blush " a little " ; but 
Dinmont, the wild Borderer, stands " aghast." 
' " Deil o' the like o' that ever I saw ! " ' says he. 

And on Sunday morning, behold our reveller 
in " a nicely-dressed bob-wig, upon every hair of 
which a zealous and careful barber had bestowed 
its proper allowance of powder; a well-brushed 
black suit, with very clean shoes and gold 
buckles and stock-buckle; a manner rather 
reserved and formal than intrusive," walking 
demurely through the blinded streets (which 
remained unswept on the Sabbath) to hear and 

1 Guy Manner ing, vol. ii. 



PROLOGUE: HIS HERITAGE. 5 

digest, with a solemn and perfectly sincere gusto, 
a sermon " in which the Calvinism of the Kirk 
of Scotland was ably supported, yet made the 
basis of a sound system of practical morals." 

Sir Walter, sane, humorous, kindly, is content 
to do no more than indicate the condition of 
manners. One may compare the observations 
of Mr Edward Burt, who " made a tour " in 
Scotland and the Highlands about the middle of 
the last century — a feat, in those days, sufficient 
to justify the writing of a book. " But when 
persons of fortune will suffer their Houses to be 
worse than Hog-sties, I do not see how they 
differ, in that particular, from Hottentots," says 
the fastidious Englishman. And, " I have often 
admired at the zeal of a pretty well-dressed 
Jacobite, when I have seen her go down one of 
the narrow steep Wytidcs in Edinburgh, through 
an Accumulation of the worst Kind of Filth, and 
whip up a blind Stair-case almost as foul, yet 
with an Air as degage, as if she was going to 
meet a favourite Lover in some poetic Bower." ^ 
The Pleydells and Nicol Jarvies of Sir Walter 
were douce religious citizens ; let us set beside 
their portraits a sketch limned by the elder poet, 
Allan Ramsay, in his Elegy on Maggy Johnston, 
who died mmo 1 7 1 1 . 

1 Burt's Letters, 1755. 



6 R. L. STEVENSON. 

" To tell the Truth, now Maggy dang, 
Of Customers she had a bang; 
For Lairds and Souters a' did gang 

To drink bedeen ; 
The Barn and Yard was aft sae thrang, 

We took the Green. 

And there by Dizens we lay down, 
Syne sweetly ca'd the Healths arown, 
To bonny Lasses black or brown, 

As we loo'd best ; 
In Bumpers we dull cares did drown, 

And took our Rest. 

When in our Poutch we fand some Clinks, 
And took a turn o'er Brunesfield Links, 
Aften in Maggy's at Hy jinks. 

We guzl'd Scuds, 
Till we could scarce, wi' hale out Drinks, 

Cast aff our Duds. 

We drank and drew, and fill'd again, 
O wow ! but we were blyth and fain ; 
When ony had their Court mistain, 

O it was nice 
To hear us a' cry, Pike your Bain, 

And spell yer Dice. 

For close we us'd to drink and rant, 
Until we did baith glowr and gaunt, 

Right swash I trow ; 

Then of auld Stories we did cant 

When we were fou." 

And so on, and so forth. The lust of drink, 
you see, is described in terms of unmistakable 



PROLOGUE: HIS HERITAGE. J 

enthusiasm; an enthusiasm whose shadow sur- 
vives to this day among a certain class in the 
North, although hard drinking be the fashion 
there no longer. Drink and talk and secret 
licence were, it seems, the compensations de- 
manded by human nature for the grievous 
oppressions of the Kirk, which had long exer- 
cised a tyranny nigh impossible of apprehen- 
sion by the English mind. Some half-century 
later we find Robert Fergusson (to name but 
him), Ramsay's direct heir in the descending 
heritage of letters, versifying upon the old theme. 
When the Scotch eighteenth-century makers 
treat of other themes, the result is frequently 
bald, meaningless, and conventional. But take 
liquor or sculduddery, and you shall find the 
Muse, with loins girded and lamp briskly burn- 
ing, ready to discourse with eloquence and fire. 

" Auld Reekie ! thou'rt the canty hole ; 
A bield for mony a cauldrife soul, 
Who snugly at thine ingle loll, 

Baith warm and couth ; 
While round they gar the bicker roll. 

To weet their mouth." ^ 

Thus Fergusson. And — 

" An' frae ilk corner o' the nation, 
We've lasses eke o' recreation, 

1 R. Fergusson, 77^1? Daft Days. 



8 R. L. STEVENSON. 

That at close-mou's tak' up their station 

By ten o'clock. 
The Lord deliver frae temptation 

A' honest fowk! "^ 

The poet is not superfluous to mark the time of 
day ; it was at ten o'clock P.M. — so the dis- 
gusted Burt informs us — that the windows were 
opened, and the refuse of the many-storeyed 
" lands" was poured bodily into the street. 

Although Robert Fergusson died seventy-six 
years ere Robert Louis Stevenson was born, and 
although, in the interval, the star of Robert Burns 
had risen and burned and fallen in ashes, and Sir 
Walter had founded his imperishable monument, 
the mention of " Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, 
Burns's model," ^ brings us directly to Stevenson; 
if only for Stevenson's strange fancy — notorious 
now to every reader of the daily newspaper — 
that by some esoteric process of transmigration, 
whose secret was hidden in the heavens, Fer- 
gusson's spirit lived again within him. And as 
in Robert Burns we have the last expression, the 
final avatar, of the "old Scots peasant-world," ^ 
so, I think, in Robert Louis Stevenson we have 

^ R. Fergusson, Answer to Mr J. S.''s Epistle. 

^ R. L. S., Picturesque Azotes on Edinburgh. 

• "The poor-living, lewd, grimy, free-spoken, ribald, old Scots 
peasant-world came to a full, brilliant, even majestic close in his 
work." — W. E. Henley, Essay on Robert Burns, ^c. 



PROLOGUE: HIS HERITAGE. 9 

the consummation of the old Scots middle-class 
civic tradition — the tradition of letters, of talk, of 
free-living, and of theology. 

Stevenson was born into a city and a time 
when the old manners and customs and opinions 
were changing every day, giving place to the 
" Anglified " modern polity we know ; the face 
of the old city was fast losing its ancient linea- 
ments ; and the last of old Edinburgh, observed, 
when he was still a youth, with Stevenson's 
romantic vision and chronicled in his golden 
phrase, lives very fitly in the pages of his 
Picturesque Notes on EdinbiirgJi. The book is 
written from the romantic point of view through- 
out. There was none of that indefinable quality 
which we have agreed to call romance in Fer- 
gusson — none in Allan Ramsay, none (as Mr 
Henley has demonstrated) in Burns. Realism 
there was in plenty in these urban poets ; but, for 
romance, we must look to another spiritual an- 
cestor, Sir Walter Scott, the Borderer. And in 
Stevenson we find the two qualities curiously 
conjoined. Upon this point, we may note that 
M. Marcel Schwob has the following obser- 
vation in an acutely analytical essay, which is 
even more interesting in the light it throws 
upon the predilections of the author, as a 
French contemporary artist profoundly versed 



10 R. L. STEVENSON. 

in English literature, than in its " explication '* 
of Stevenson : — 

Nous avions trouv6 chez bien des ^crivains le pouvoir 
de hausser la reality par la couleur des mots ; je ne 
sais pas si on trouverait ailleurs des images qui, sans 
I'aide des mots, sont plus violentes que les images 
r^elles. Ce sont des images romantiques, puisqu'elles 
sont destinies a accroitre I'^clat de Taction par le 
d^cor; ce sont des images irr^elles, puisqu'aucun ceil 
humain ne saurait les voir dans le monde que nous 
connaissons. Et cependant elles sont, a proprement 
parler, la quintessence de la r^alit^.^ 

Upon which there falls one remark to be made 
— that the " ceil humain " of Stevenson did, in 
efTect, behold these vivid images. 

Who save Stevenson could have written the 
following description of an Edinburgh relic? — 

The tallest of these lands, as they are locally termed, 
have long since been burned out ; but to this day it is 
not uncommon to see eight or ten windows at a flight ; 
and the cliff of building which hangs imminent over 
Waverley Bridge would still put many natural preci- 
pices to shame. The cellars are already high above 
the gazer's head, planted on the steep hill-side ; as for 
the garret, all the furniture may be in the pawn-shop, 
but it commands a famous prospect to the Highland 
hills. The poor man may roost up there in the 

1 Marcel Schwob, " R. L. S.," New Review, February 1896. 



PROLOGUE: HIS HERITAGE. II 

centre of Edinburgh, and yet have a peep of the 
green country from his window ; he shall see the 
quarters of the well-to-do fathoms underneath, with 
their broad squares and gardens ; he shall have 
nothing overhead but a few spires, the stone top- 
gallants of the city ; and perhaps the wind may 
reach him with a rustic pureness, and bring a smack 
of the sea, or of flowering lilacs in the spring . . . 
Times are changed. In one house, perhaps, two 
score families herd together; and, perhaps, not one 
of them is wholly out of the reach of want. The 
great hotel is given over to discomfort from the 
foundation to the chimney-tops ; everywhere a pinch- 
ing, narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of sluttish- 
ness and dirt. In the first room there is a birth, in 
another a death, in a third a sordid drinking bout, 
and the detective and the Bible-reader cross upon 
the stairs . . . One night I went along the Cowgate 
after every one was abed but the policeman, and 
stopped by hazard before a tall land. The moon 
touched upon its chimneys, and shone blankly on 
the upper windows : there was no light anywhere in 
the great bulk of building; but as I stood there it 
seemed to me that I could hear quite a body of 
quiet sounds from the interior ; doubtless there were 
many clocks ticking, and people snoring on their 
backs. And thus, as I fancied, the dense life within 
made itself faintly audible in my ears, family after 
family contributing its quota to the general hum, 
and the whole pile beating in tune to its timepieces, 



12 R. L. STEVENSON. 

like a great disordered heart ... It is true that over- 
population was at least as dense in the epoch of lords 
and ladies, and that nowadays some customs which 
made Edinburgh notorious of yore have been fortu- 
nately pretermitted . , . But an aggregation of comfort 
is not distasteful like an aggregation of the reverse [not 
thus would that adventurous traveller, Mr Burt, have 
written]. Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, 
and divines and lawyers, may have been crowded into 
these houses in the past — perhaps the more the 
merrier . . . [But], the Bedouins camp within 
Pharaoh's palace-walls, and the old war-ship is 
given over to the rats. We are already a far way 
from the days when powdered heads were plentiful 
in these alleys, with jolly, port-wine faces under- 
neath . . .^ 

A far way indeed, O graceful moralist ! were it 
only by the modern touch observable in every 
line of your picture, we should remember that. 
A far way, but the end of the road is near ; and 
the sentimental youth who stands elegantly 
moralising beneath the " stone top-gallants " of 
the immemorial city, savouring the tang of the 
sea that lies beyond, with a vagrant thought 
upon the " flowering lilacs in the spring," is 
presently to decorate, with a surprising variety 
of charming sculptures, the cenotaph of Old 
Scotland. 

^ R. L. S., Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 



II. 

HIS ANCESTRY. 

Peace and her huge invasion to these shores 
Puts daily home ; innumerable sails 
Dawn on the far horizon and draw near; 
Innumerable loves, uncounted hopes 
To our wild coasts, not darkling now, approach : 
Not now obscure, since thou and thine are there, 
And bright on the lone isle, the foundered reef. 
The long, resounding foreland. Pharos stands. 

— R. L. S., To my Father. Underwoods. 

As I have tried to indicate, however lightly, the 
drift of that broad tide in human affairs which 
shaped the destinies of Robert Louis Stevenson, 
so I would endeavour to trace, as briefly as pos- 
sible, the influences which flowed to him by the 
directer current of heredity. In his little history, 
A Family of Engine erSy and his portrait of Thomas 
Stevenson} himself has told us all that we need 
to know. 

Alan Stevenson, great-grandfather of Robert 

1 R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 



14 R. L. STEVENSON. 

Louis, and his brother Hugh, were West Indian 
merchants, Alan managing the business at home, 
Hugh abroad. Both brothers died young; and 
Alan left a widow, and a son, Robert Stevenson. 
The bereaved wife, Jean, was the daughter of one 
David Lillie, " a builder in Glasgow, and several 
times * Deacon of the Wrights ' " ; and so in 
him we note a craftsman linked to that family 
which was presently to be renowned throughout 
the world for cunning craftsmanship. When 
her son Robert was fifteen, Jean Lillie married 
Thomas Smith, merchant burgher of Edinburgh ; 
and thus we come to a second craftsman, who 
was also something of an inventor, and some- 
thing of a commercial force. 

He appears [says Stevenson] as a man, ardent, pas- 
sionate, practical, designed for affairs and prospering 
in them far beyond the average. He founded a solid 
business in lamps and oils, and was the sole pro- 
prietor of a concern called the Greenside Company's 
Works . . . He was also, it seems, a shipowner and 
underwriter. He built himself " a land " — Nos. i and 
2 Baxter's Place, then [within the present century] no 
such unfashionable neighbourhood — and died, leaving 
his only son in easy circumstances, and giving to his 
three surviving daughters portions of five thousand 
pounds and upwards. There is no standard of suc- 
cess in life [remarks the biographer] ; but in one of 
its meanings, this is to succeed. 



HIS ANCESTRY. 1 5 

In 1786 Thomas Smith was appointed engineer 
to the newly-formed Board of Northern Light- 
houses (the superiority of his proposed lamp and 
reflectors over open fires of coal secured his ap- 
pointment) ; and thus begins the famous tradition 
which indissolubly connects the name of Steven- 
son with sea-lights and beacons all the world 
over. For Robert Stevenson, Thomas Smith's 
stepson, became the engineer's assistant, and 
later his partner, and in due time, " by an extra- 
ordinary arrangement, in which it is hard not to 
suspect the managing hand of a mother, Jean 
Smith became the wife of Robert Stevenson," 
The women of this double household, we are 
told, were immersed in such extremes of piety 
that the men — scrupulous, godly, honest, indus- 
trious, even heroical souls as they were — appear 
to have depressed these elect females as some- 
thing worldly. That strange, artificial cleavage 
between things human and things divine, which 
the English mind (consciously or unconsciously) 
rejects as something deformed, begins already to 
appear in the Stevensonian annals. 

Cunning of brain and art of hand already con- 
trive to co-exist with arrogant theology; and in 
the mind of Robert Stevenson, the real founder 
of the family, a fine working compromise was 
effected, such a compromise as may so often be 



l6 R. L. STEVENSON. 

observed in kindly, simple natures, unaffectedly 
in love with their calling. Were it not for such 
gentle, illogical reasonableness, the world must 
surely have ceased to spin upon its axis long ago. 
Robert Stevenson did a man's work in the 
world, and left an enduring inheritance. 

The seas into which his labours carried the new 
engineer were still scarce charted, the coasts still 
dark ; his way on shore was often far beyond the 
convenience of any road ; the isles in which he must 
sojourn were still partly savage. He must toss much 
in boats ; he must often adventure on horseback by 
the dubious bridle-track through unfrequented wilder- 
nesses ; he must sometimes plant his lighthouse in 
the very camp of wreckers ; and he was continually 
exposed to the vicissitudes of out-door life. The joy 
of my grandfather in this career [continues R. L. S. 
with an evident access of sympathy] was strong as the 
love of woman. It lasted him through youth and man- 
hood, it burned strong in age, and at the approach 
of death his last yearning was to renew these loved 
experiences. What he felt himself he continued to 
attribute to all around him. And to this supposed 
sentiment in others I find him continually, almost 
pathetically, appealing : often in vain. 

In 1807, upon the retirement of his stepfather, 
Thomas Smith, Robert Stevenson became sole 
engineer to the Board of Northern Lights ; and 
in the same year he began the building of the 



HIS ANCESTRY. 1 7 

Bell Rock Lighthouse. Himself has written the 
history of that notable achieven ent ; and his 
grandson has appended an abric ^ment to his 
Family of Engineers. It is enough ^r my purpose 
to remark, in this narration, the c Id man's con- 
stant delight in the picturesque side of his work, 
a delight which was only subordinate to the inde- 
fatigable industry and unsleeping vigilance of a 
master-craftsman ; an industry and a vigilance 
which carried to accomplishment an extremely 
hazardous task, extending over four years, with- 
out a single mishap which might have been 
foreseen or prevented. Here, for instance, is 
an extract from Robert Stevenson's journal, in 
which he preserved a very full and minute 
record of these laborious years : — 

The incident just noticed [says the engineer — that 
of the waves pouring suddenly upon his head, over 
the new walls, then fifty-eight feet high, of the rising 
lighthouse] — the incident just noticed did not create 
more surprise in the mind of the writer than the 
sublime appearance of the waves as they rolled 
majestically over the rock. This scene he greatly 
enjoyed while sitting at his cabin-window; each 
wave approached the beacon like a vast scroll un- 
folding ; and in passing discharged a quantity of air, 
which he not only distinctly felt, but was even sufficient 
to lift the leaves of a book which lay before him.^ 
^ R. L. S., A Family of Engineers, 



1 8 R. L. STEVENSON. 

With this same vision would his grandson have 
looked forth of the cabin-window ; in the same 
spirit — though not precisely in the same terms 
— would he have chronicled his observation. 
And again : — 

To windward, the sprays fell from the height above 
noticed [sixty-four feet above the rock] in the most 
wonderful cascades, and streamed down the walls of 
the building in froth as white as snow. To leeward of 
the lighthouse the colUsion or meeting of the waves 
produced a pure white kind of drift ; it rose about 
thirty feet in height, like a fine downy mist, which in 
its fall felt upon the face and hands more like a dry 
powder than a liquid substance.^ 

Compare his grandson's description of the 
breakers — " the Merry Men " — in the Roost of 
Aros : — 

On such a night, ... he peers upon a world of 
blackness, where the waters wheel and boil, where" the 
waves joust together with the noise of an explosion, 
and the foam towers and vanishes in the twinkling of 
an eye . . . The fury, height, and transiency of their 
spoutings was a thing to be seen and not recounted. 
High over our heads on the cliif rose their white 
columns in the darkness; and at the same instant, 
like phantoms, they were gone. Sometimes three at 
a time would thus aspire and vanish ; sometimes a 
1 R. L. S., A Family of Engineers. 



HIS ANCESTRY. I9 

gust took them, and the spray would fall about us, 
heavy as a wave.^ 

Every stone of that tall building on the Bell 
Rock, which with the leaping waves makes so 
fine a picture to the architect, as he sits observ- 
ant at his cabin-window, was cut out with his own 
hands " in the model; and the manner in which 
the courses were fitted, joggled, trenailed, wedged, 
and the bond broken, is intricate as a puzzle and 
beautiful by ingenuity." And the same artist 
" grew to be the familiar of members of Parlia- 
ment, judges of the Court of Session, and ' landed 
gentlemen ' ; learned a ready address, had a flow 
of interesting conversation, and when he was re- 
ferred to as ' a highly respectable bourgeois' re- 
sented the description." 2 With all that, "no 
servant of the Northern Lights came to Edin- 
burgh but he was entertained at Baxter's Place 
to breakfast. There, at his own table, my 
grandfather sat down delightedly with his broad- 
spoken homespun officers."^ Moreover, as In- 
spector of Lighthouses, Robert Stevenson shows 
himself, in his reports and letters, as an unflinch- 
ing martinet; he was "king in the service to 
his finger-tips. All should go in his way, from 

1 R. L. S., The Merry Men. 

■^ R. L. S., ^ Family of Engineers. " Ibid. 



20 R. L. STEVENSON. 

the principal lightkeeper's coat to the assist- 
ants' fender, from the gravel in the garden- 
walks to the bad smell in the kitchen, or the 
oil-spots on the store-room floor. . . . His 
whole relation to the service was, in fact, 
patriarchal." ^ 

Here, then, we have the picture of a man who 
is, before all things, a maker and a contriver; 
who is also of a strongly adventurous turn, a 
shrewd judge of character — as any man must be 
whose relations with any given body of men are 
"patriarchal" — a man of humour, of natural 
piety, of great kindness of heart, of an unbending 
sense of duty, and a man, withal, owning some- 
thing of a bias towards the romantic and pictur- 
esque, which he loved to express, not without 
some obscure sense of pleasure in the pomp and 
sound of language. This man, then, marries 
Jean Smith, daughter of his stepfather, the first 
lighthouse engineer ; and of this union comes a 
family, of whom three sons, Alan, David, and 
Thomas, were all, successively or conjointly, 
engineers to the Board of Northern Lights. 

" Thomas Stevenson was born in Edinburgh 
in the year i8r8. . . . The Bell Rock, his 
father's great triumph, was finished before he was 
born ; but he served under his brother Alan in 

1 R. L. S., A Fa7nily of Enghteers. 



HIS ANCESTRY. 21 

the building of Skerryvore, the noblest of all 
extant deep-sea lights." ^ The tradition, so 
nobly begun, was nobly carried forward; the 
firm of Stevenson " were consulting engineers 
to the Indian, the New Zealand, and the Jap- 
anese Lighthouse Boards, so that Edinburgh 
was a world-centre for that branch of applied 
science." ^ 

Upon the character of Thomas Stevenson I 
cannot do better than quote the words of his 
son, Robert Louis. It is curious to note, in 
that portrait, the mingled features of his father 
who was before him, and those of his son, 
Robert Louis, who came after him, and whose 
works we know- 
He was a man [says Stevenson] of a somewhat 
antique strain : with a blended sternness and soft- 
ness that was wholly Scottish, and at first somewhat 
bewildering ; with a profound essential melancholy of 
disposition and (what often accompanies it) the most 
humorous geniality in company ; shrewd and childish ; 
passionately attached, passionately prejudiced ; a man 
of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no very 
stable foothold for himself among life's troubles. Yet 
he was a wise adviser ; many men, and these not in- 
considerable, took counsel with him habitually . . . 
He had excellent taste, though whimsical and partial 

^ R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. ^ Ibid. 



22 R. L. STEVENSON. 

. . . and though he read Httle, was constant to his 
favourite books . . . Lactantius, Vossius, and Car- 
dinal Bona were his chief authors . . . When he 
was indisposed, he had two books, Guy Mannering 
and The Parent's Assistant, of which he never 
wearied . . . The Church of Scotland, of which 
he held the doctrines (though in a sense of his 
own [mark the saving clause]) and to which he 
bore a clansman's loyalty, profited often by his 
time and money . . . His sense of his own un- 
worthiness I have called morbid ; morbid, too, were 
his sense of the fleetingness of life and his concern 
for death. He had never accepted the conditions 
of man's life or his own character; and his inmost 
thoughts were ever tinged with the Celtic melan- 
choly . . . His talk, compounded of so much 
sterling sense and so much freakish humour, and 
clothed in language so apt, droll, and emphatic, 
was a perpetual delight to all who knew him before 
the clouds began to settle on his mind. His use 
of language was both just and picturesque ; and 
when at the beginning of his illness he began to 
feel the ebbing of this power, it was strange and 
painful to hear him reject one word after another 
as inadequate, and at length desist from the search 
and leave his phrase unfinished rather than finish 
it without propriety. It was perhaps another Celtic 
trait that his affections and emotions, passionate as 
these were, and liable to passionate ups and downs, 
found the most eloquent expression both in words 



HIS ANCESTRY. 23 

and gestures. Love, anger, and indignation shone 
through him and broke forth in imagery, like what 
we read of in Southern races. 

And when Stevenson is writing Treasure Island, 
he tells us that his " father caught fire at once 
with all the romance and childishness of his 
original nature. His own stories, that every 
night of his life he put himself to sleep with, 
dealt perpetually with ships, roadside inns, 
robbers, old sailors, and commercial travellers 
before the era of steam. "^ And this, be it noted, 
was the man who " wrote also in defence of 
Christianity, and his work was highly praised 
by many learned authorities. His Layman s 
Sermoji is to be found in a volume of his Life 
and Work." ' 

Altogether a striking figure; one to command 
respect, to call forth affection and admiration. 
And when Thomas Stevenson married the 
daughter of Dr Balfour the divine, an ingre- 
dient of theology again tinctures the family 
strain, and again from the female side. * 

^ R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 

2 R. L. S., Essays and Fragme7tts. 

8 E. Blantyre Simpson, Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh 
Days. 

* And there came more than that. At past sixty, after a life- 
time of conventional Edinburgh, this lady broke up the house in 
Heriot Row, removed herself and her belongings to Apia, learned 



24 R- L. STEVENSON. 

" Now I often wonder," says Stevenson, dis- 
coursing in his pleasantly egoistic vein, " what I 
have inherited from this old minister. I must 
suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching 
sermons, and so am I, though I never heard it 
maintained that either of us loved to hear them." 

Well, it may seem to us now, looking back 
upon the history of the country of his birth, and 
the mingled charactery of his ancestors, that a 
scion of the nature of Robert Louis Stevenson 
might have been predicted with some assurance. 
We have the old Scottish tradition of letters, 
free-living, and theology; the first and last 
elements, the love of learning and of theology, 
are marked in the Stevensonian line ; the second 
element, of (what I have called) free-living, seems 
counteracted by a strong and religious char- 
acter; we have, in addition, in the Stevensons 
and the Smiths, the inherited faculty of inven- 
tion, the romantic bias, the insight into char- 
acter, the delight in words for their own sake, 
and, above all, the austere devotion, as a point 
of honour, to perfect craftsmanship. 

Assume, for the nonce, that the Stevenson 

to ride bare-backed and to go bare-footed, and took on the life at 
Vailima and the life of Tusitala's native friends with equal gusto 
and intelligence. Stevenson was fond of calling himself a tramp 
and a gipsy; and that he could do so with justice was owing to 
the fact that his mother was Margaret Balfour. 



HIS ANCESTRY 2$ 

whom we know through his work is strangely- 
compounded of these elements ; a thesis which 
it is my business to exemplify in the pages that 
follow : assume, I say, that he had a certain 
scholarship, and loved preaching, and romance, 
and the infinite diversity of the creature ; that 
with a keen vision and a faculty of ingenious 
invention he joined incomparable workmanship : 
assume all this, and I must still remark two 
main distinctions betwixt Stevenson and his 
immediate forebears. 

And first, in the records of the engineers his 
forefathers, we find no trace of, what are called, 
irregular courses of life, which are among the 
commonest influences of the time in which they 
lived and worked. But, how should Stevenson, 
such as he was, born into the last decaying 
period of the old order of things, escape its 
influence? I cannot but think that the old 
Scottish grossness, how transfigured and de- 
corated soever, reappears in the gruesome and 
ugly elements of which he makes such striking 
use in his work. 

And for my second distinction : these engi- 
neers were men of strong body, who, in health 
and vigour, accomplished an amazing amount of 
work. " He sought health in his youth in the 
Isle of Wight," says Robert Louis Stevenson, 



26 R. L. STEVENSON. 

gossiping of his mother's father, " and I have 
sought it in both hemispheres; but whereas he 
found and kept it, I am still on the quest." 

He was still, courageous seeker, upon the 
quest when death took him ; and in considering 
his work, with all its brilliancy and variety and 
charm, we must still bear in mind that it is the 
work of a man of frail constitution, often beset 
by sickness, often indomitably toiling — indeed, 
so intense was his need of self-expression, that 
I had almost written "amusing himself" — in 
the very clutch of the enemy. 



III. 

OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 

Say not of me that weakly I declined 
The labours of my sires, and fled the sea, 
The towers we founded and the lamps we lit, 
To play at home with paper like a child. 
But rather say : In the afternoon of tit/ie 
A streniiojis family dusted from its hands 
The sand of granite, and beholding far 
Along the sounding coast its pyramids 
And tall memorials catch the dying stin. 
Smiled well content, and to this childish task 
Around the fire addressed its evening hours. 

R. L. S., Underwoods. 

There never came a Fool out of Scotland. 

Old Saiu. 

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, the only 
child of Thomas Stevenson, civil engineer, and 
Margaret Isabella his wife, youngest daughter 
of James Balfour, minister of the parish of 
Colinton in Mid-Lothian, was born on the 
13th of November 1S50, at 8 Howard Place, 
Edinburgh. From about his eighteenth year 
he chose to sign himself Robert Louis Steven- 



28 R. L. STEVENSON. 

son.^ Robert Louis seems to have been a child 
of a vain, delicate, and excitable temperament, 
suffering frequently from illness ; and, not less 
frequently, from the penalties of a romantic im- 
agination. As his works, both by accident and 
design, reflect and chronicle the history of him- 
self from stage to stage of his career in a manner 
peculiarly his own among writers, so we may 
learn all we need to know of his childhood — 
the childhood of a born romantic — as of his later 
life, from his own verses and essays. Hence, 
in A Child's Garden of Verses, Child's Play, 
Random Memories, The Manse, id. Plain, 2d. 
Coloured, and A Chapter on Dreams, we seem 
to disengage the picture of an eager, frail 
little boy, with remarkable eyes, lustrous and 
brown, dwelling largely in a world of his own 
invention ; loving to read, or to hear read, books 
of the romantic order; and even desirous, with 
infantine zeal, to write them. Mr Sidney Colvin 
tells us that " A ' History of Moses,' dictated 
in his sixth year, and an account of 'Travels 
in Perth' in his ninth, are still extant;"^ 

1 Louis, because there was a certain Bailie extant whose poli- 
tical opinions revolted young Stevenson's soul, and whose sur-' 
name was (insolently) Lewis. But Stevenson's friends continued 
to pronounce his name Lewis to the end. 

2 Dictionary of National Biography: art., " Stevenson, Robert 
Louis." 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 29 

and in Miss E. Blantyre Simpson's account of 
Stevenson's childish days^ we find him engaged 
one winter, together with his cousin, R. A. M. 
Stevenson, witli a series of adventures which 
happened upon a fabulous island. Robert Louis's 
island was called Noseingdale, the island of R. 
A. M. Stevenson, Encyclopaedia, and each 
chieftain illustrated his island's history. Many 
children begin so, it is true, and afterwards they 
change. The point is, that as it was in the 
beginning with Stevenson, so it was with him 
to the end. 

In May, 1857, Mr and Mrs Stevenson, after 
an intermediate sojourn of four years at No. i 
Inverleith Terrace, took up their abode at 17 
Heriot Row, which remained the family head- 
quarters until the death of Thomas Stevenson 
in 1887. When he was eight years old, the boy 
Robert Louis was put to a preparatory school 
kept by a Mr Henderson, in India Street, where 
he remained for two or three years; in his 
eleventh year he began an attendance at the 
Edinburgh Academy (" a junior rival to the 
High School where Scott was educated""), 
which lasted, at intervals, for some time. Here 

^ E. Blantyre Simpson, Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh 
Days. 
2 Ibid. 



30 R. L. STEVENSON. ^ 

he started a school magazine in manuscript, TJie 
Swibeani, which seems to have been almost en- 
tirely written, edited, and illustrated by himself.^ 
When he was thirteen he went for a few months 
to a boarding-school kept by a Mr Wyatt at 
Spring Grove, near London. Coming home 
again to Edinburgh, he was sent next year 
to Mr Thompson's private school in Frederick 
Street, where he remained until his seventeenth 
year. And here, in his fifteenth year, he showed 
to his schoolmate Baildon a drama based upon 
the history of Deacon Brodie, the genesis of the 
play written, fourteen years later, in collabora- 
tion with Mr Henley.^ Would we learn what 
manner of schoolboy was little Robert Louis, 
we may turn to his own description: — 

Many writers [he says] have vigorously described 
the pains of the first day or the first night at school ; 
to a boy of any enterprise I believe they are more 
often agreeably exciting. Misery — or at least misery 
unrelieved — is confined to another period, to the days 
of suspense and the "dreadful looking-for" of de- 
parture ; when the old life is running to an end, and 
the new life, with its new interests, not yet begun ; 
and to the pain of an imminent parting, there is added 
the unrest of a state of conscious pre-existence. The 

1 E. Blantyre Simpson, Robert Louis Sievettson^s Edinburgh 
Days. 

2 Ibid. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 31 

area railings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of 
semi-suburban tan-pits, the song of the church-bells 
upon a Sunday, the thin high voices of compatriot 
children in a playing-field — what a sudden, what an 
overpowering pathos breathes to him from each familiar 
circumstance ! The assaults of sorrow come not from 
within, as it seems to him, but from without. I was 
proud and glad to go to school ; had I been let alone 
I could have borne up like any hero ; but there was 
around me, in all my native town, a conspiracy of 
lamentation: "Poor little boy, he is going away — 
unkind little boy, he is going to leave us " ; so the 
unspoken burthen followed me as I went, with yearn- 
ing and reproach. And at length, one melancholy 
afternoon in the early autumn, and at a place where it 
seems to me, looking back, it must be always autumn 
and generally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the 
face of all 1 saw — the long empty road, the lines of 
the tali houses, the church upon the hill, the woody 
hillside garden — a look of such a piercing sadness that 
my heart died ; and seating myself on a door-step, I 
shed tears of miserable sympathy. A benevolent cat 
cumbered me the while with consolations — we two 
were alone in all that was visible of the London Road : 
two poor waifs who had each tasted sorrow — and 
she fawned upon the weeper, and gambolled for his 
entertainment, watching the efifect, it seemed, with 
motherly eyes. 

For the sake of the cat, God bless her ! I confessed 
at home the story of my weakness ... It was judged, 



32 R. L. STEVENSON. 

if I had thus brimmed over on the pubUc highway, 
some change of scene was (in the medical sense) 
indicated; my father at the time was visiting the 
harbour lights of Scotland ; and it was decided that 
he should take me along with him around a portion of 
the shores of Fife ; my first professional tour, my first 
journey in the complete character of man, without the 
help of petticoats.^ 

Doubtless some change of scene — in the medi- 
cal sense — was indicated; but no migration 
might change the acutely sensitive, romantic- 
ally sentimental, egoistic temperament, which 
was able, not only to receive so vivid and 
picturesque an impression in early boyhood — a 
faculty which is, after all, no uncommon char- 
acteristic of that golden age — but, to retain it for 
some years in all its pristine freshness, and then 
gracefully to set the memory in words. And 
with that excursion to Fife, Robert Louis Steven- 
son's education may be said to have begun ; 
from that time forth, from choice or necessity, 
he became a traveller and a wanderer. And 
so, while he was yet at Mr Thompson's school, 
he made " frequent visits to health-resorts in 
Scotland ; occasional excursions with his father 
on his nearer professional rounds — d?. ^., to the 
coasts and lighthouses of Fife in 1864; and also 

1 R. L. S., Random Memories. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 33 

longer journeys — to Germany and Holland in 
1862, to Italy in 1863, to the Riviera in the 
spring of 1864, and to Torquay in 1865 ^^^ 
1866;"^ and although we learn, also, that he 
enjoyed the privilege of instruction from private 
tutors upon most of these occasions, it was then, 
as always, the things which lay aside from the 
common road of knowledge which counted in 
his education. We have his own (oft-quoted) 
statement of the matter: "All through my boy- 
hood and youth I was known and pointed out 
for the pattern of an idler; and yet." he adds, 
" I was always busy on my own private end, 
which was to learn to write." ^ At the age of 
seventeen Robert Louis Stevenson was entered 
as a student at Edinburgh University; and 
during the time of his attendance at the classes 
there, we have the same story: "Indeed, I denied 
myself many opportunities ; acting upon an ex- 
tensive and highly rational system of truantry, 
which cost me a great deal of trouble to put 
in exercise — perhaps as much as would have 
taught me Greek — and sent me forth into the 
world and the profession of letters with the 
merest shadow of an education." ^ 

^ Dictionary of National Bio,::;rapJ7y •■ art., " Steveuson, Robert 
Louis." 

- R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. ^ Ibid. 

3 



34 R- L. STEVENSON. 

" At the same time," says Mr Colvin, " he 
read precociously and omnivorously in the belles- 
lettres, including a very wide range of English 
poetry, fiction, and essays, and a fairly wide 
range of French." ^ Later in life, he devoted 
much time to the study of the history of the 
Highlands, French history of the fifteenth cen- 
tury, and to the records of the First Napoleon 
and the Duke of Wellington. At the time when 
Robert Louis left school, his father bought 
Swanston Cottage, which, lying in the Pentland 
Hills, three miles from Edinburgh, became the 
country residence of the family. Here Steven- 
son made acquaintance with John Todd, the 
shepherd, as related in the Pastoral ;^ and it 
was from John Todd, I am told, that he ac- 
quired at first-hand much of his knowledge of 
the classic vernacular. Originally intended for 
the family profession, Stevenson, while at the 
University, was at first a pupil of Fleeming 
Jenkin, Professor of Engineering, whose bio- 
graphy, in course of time, he came to write. 

Here is an extract from the Memoir of that 
singular, admirable being, Fleeming Jenkin, 
which discovers to us (as biographies are apt 

1 Dictionary of National Biography : art., " Stevenson, Robert 
Louis." 

2 R. L. S., Memories and Portraits, 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 35 

to do) at least as much of the author as of 
his hero. 

I was incUned [says Stevenson] to regard any pro- 
fessor as a joke, and Fleeming as a particularly good 
joke, perhaps the broadest in the vast pleasantry of my 
curriculum. I was not able to follow his lectures ; I 
somehow dared not misconduct myself, as was my 
customary solace ; and I refrained from attending. 
This brought me at the end of the session into a 
relation with my contemned professor that completely 
opened my eyes. During the year, bad student as I 
was, he had shown a certain leaning to my society ; I 
had been to his house ; he had asked me to take a 
humble part in his theatricals ; I was a master in the 
art of extracting a certificate even at the cannon's 
mouth ; and I was under no apprehension. But when 
I approached Fleeming I found myself in another 
world ; he would have naught of me. " It is quite 
useless {or you to come to me, Mr Stevenson. There 
may be doubtful cases, there is no doubt about yours. 
You have simply no^ attended my class." The docu- 
ment was necessary to me for family considerations ; 
and presently I stooped to such pleadings and rose to 
such adjurations as make my ears burn to remember. 
He was quite unmoved ; he had no pity for me. 
" You are no fool," said he, " and you chose your 
course." I showed him that he had misconceived 
his duty, that certificates were things of form, attend- 
ance a matter of taste. Two things, he replied, had 
been required for graduation : a certain competency 



36 R. L. STEVENSON. 

proved in the final trials, and a certain period of 
genuine training proved by certificate ; if he did as I 
desired, not less than if he gave me hints for an 
examination, he was aiding me to steal a degree. 
" You see, Mr Stevenson, these are the laws and I am 
here to apply tliem," said he. I could not say but 
that this view was tenable, though it was new to me ; 
I changed my attack : it was only for my father's eye 
that I required his signature, it need never go to the 
Senatus, I had already certificates enough to justify 
my year's attendance. " Bring them to me ; I cannot 
take your word for that," said he. "Then I will 
consider." The next day I came charged with my 
certificates, a humble assortment. And when he had 
satisfied himself, " Remember," said he, " that I can 
promise nothing, but I will try to find a form of 
words." He did find one, and I am still ashamed 
when I think of his shame in giving me that paper. 
He made no reproach in speech, but his manner was 
the more eloquent ; it told me plainly what a dirty 
business we were on ; and I went from his presence, 
with my certificate indeed in my possession, but with 
no answerable sense of triumph. That was the bitter 
beginning of my love for Fleeming ; I never thought 
lightly of him afterwards.'^ 

This little story strikes the English reader, 
unused to the traditions of a Scottish university, 
with a mild amaze. A student, bone-idle and 
quite irresponsible, comes, first to demand, and 

1 R. L. S., Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 37 

then to beg, from his professor a certificate of at- 
tendance at classes which he did not attend. It 
is necessary to him, he says, for family consider- 
ations — not a new proposition, but sufficiently 
intelligible. The student is astonished to find 
that his professor considers himself in justice 
bound to refuse that prayer. Thereupon he 
pleads with the professor as with one labouring 
under singular misconceptions ; and he actually 
prevails ; and, finally, when he writes that 
professor's memoir many years afterwards, he 
cites the whole incident (careless of his own 
character) as an example of the extraordinary 
probity (or what?) of the said professor. 

The summer vacations of Stevenson's eigh- 
teenth and two following years were devoted 
to visiting the works of his father's firm, which 
were in progress at various points on the Scottish 
coast. 

And all the while [he says, when upon one of these 
expeditions] I was aware that this life of sea-bathing 
and sun-burning was for me but a holiday. In that 
year cannon were roaring for days together on French 
battlefields ; and I would sit in my isle (I call it mine, 
after the use of lovers) and think upon the war, and 
the loudness of these far-away battles, and the pain of 
the men's wounds, and the weariness of their marching. 
And I would think too of that other war which is as 



38 R. L. STEVENSON. 

old as mankind, and is indeed the life of man : the 
unsparing war, the grinding slavery of competition; 
the toil of seventy years, dear-bought bread, precarious 
honour, the perils and pitfalls, and the poor rewards. 
It was a long look forward ; the future summoned me 
as with trumpet-calls, it warned me back as with a 
voice of weeping and beseeching ; and I thrilled and 
trembled on the brink of life, like a childish bather on 
the beach, -^ 

Whatever these sentiments denote, they hardly 
denote the point of view of the heaven-born 
engineer, such as the essayist's father and 
grandfather were before him. 

This was [he says in another place] when I came as 
a young man to glean engineering experience from the 
building of the breakwater. What I gleaned, I am 
sure I do not know ; but indeed I had already my 
own private determination to be an author; I loved 
the art of words and the appearances of life ; and 
travellers, and headers, and rubble, and polished ashlar, 
and pierres perdues, and even the thrilling question of 
the string-course, interested me only (if they interested 
me at all) as properties for some possible romance or 
as words to add to my vocabulary . . . My only 
industry was in the hours when I was not on duty 
. . . Then it was that I wrote Voces Fidelium, a series 
of dramatic monologues in verse ; then that I indited 

1 R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 39 

the bulk of a Covenanting novel — like so many others, 
never finished.^ 

Plainly, this dilettante young man was not 
made of the fibre which the generations of 
Stevensons had been accustomed to look for 
in the making of a civil engineer. 

I was educated [he says, in a letter to a friend] 
for a civil engineer on my father's design, and was at 
the building of harbours and lighthouses, and worked 
in a carpenter's shop and a brass foundry, and hung 
about wood-yards and the like. Then it came out I 
was learning nothing, and, on being tightly cross- 
questioned during a dreadful evening walk, I owned I 
cared for nothing but literature. My father said that 
was no profession, but I might be called to the Bar if I 
chose. At the age of twenty-one I began to study law.** 

From childhood, Stevenson had been con- 
stantly writing: writing verse, and essays, and 
romances and plays, and imitations — everything 
— for the sake of practice in literary gymnastic. 
Of these studies. The Peiitland Rising, written in 
the author's sixteenth year, was first published 
as a pamphlet (which, as he increased in re- 
nown, became a treasure desired of collectors), 
and again, among the collected works in the 

^ R. L. S., Afefnories and Portraits. 

2 E. Blantyre Simpson, Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh 
Days. 



40 R. L. STEVENSON. 

Edinburgh Edition, together with two or three 
other juvenile pieces. It is curious, and encour- 
aging to the aspirant, to note how little natural 
facility of expression is manifested in it. There 
is nothing in the essay to distinguish it from the 
performance of any other bookish youth of six- 
teen ; and that one born so " weak-fingered " 
should eventually attain to the mastery of a 
singular opulence of diction, argues fine qualities 
of perseverance and tenacity of mind — " broken 
tenacity of mind " is his own expression.^ 
Among all the perplexities and changing aims 
and fancies of youth, he seems to have held an 
unswerving course to this one clear bourne — he 
would learn to write. He read for the Bar, and 
in due time, at the age of five-and-twenty, " on 
14th July 1875, he passed his final examination 
with credit, and was called to the Bar on the 
i6th"; ^ but all the legal erudition was by the 
way. During the four or five years from the time 
he abandoned the engineering profession to his 
call to the Bar, Stevenson was really graduating, 
in many ways, for the profession of letters. To 
begin with, he was still writing, and again writ- 
ing, and always writing. 

1 R. L. S., Vailima Letters. 

2 Dictionary oj National Biography : art, " Stevenson, Robert 
Louis." 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 4I 

I must have had some disposition to learn [he says 
of himself — confidential as usual — at this period of his 
life], for I clear-sightedly condemned my own per- 
formances. I liked doing them indeed ; but when 
they were done, I could see they were rubbish. In 
consequence, I very rarely showed them even to my 
friends ; and such friends as I chose to be my con- 
fidants. I must have chosen well, for they had the 
friendliness to be quite plain with me. " Padding," 
said one. Another wrote : " I cannot understand why 
you do lyrics so badly." No more could I ! Thrice 
I put myself in the way of a more authoritative rebuff, 
by sending a paper to a magazine. These were re- 
turned ; and I was not surprised, or even pained. If 
they had not been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I 
suspected was the case, there was no good in repeating 
the experiment ; if they had been looked at — well, 
then I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep 
on learning and living.^ 

One remarks, first of all, the admirable seri- 
ousness with which the apprentice takes his 
chosen trade. Names are familiar to us whose 
owners were authors of repute, and glibly earn- 
ing quite comfortable little incomes at an age 
when Stevenson is still "clear-sightedly" (and 
probably with perfect justice) condemning his 
own performances ; and yet, in the end, he 
has outstripped the most of his contemporaries 

1 R. L. S ., Ilfetnories and Poj-traits. 



42 R. L. STEVENSON. 

But, one remarks in addition, that the aspirant 
has begun at last to suspect that the manner of 
literature is not entirely and absolutely every- 
thing necessary to the perfect author, but that 
the matter, also, counts for a little : " I must 
keep on learning and living^' he says. 

And it was during those four or five years of 
his life, from his twentieth year to his twenty- 
fifth, that the Stevenson whom we know upon 
the narrow stage of literary history was making 
himself. In the beginning of these years, to 
the vain, introspective, hyper-sensitive youth of 
The Pent land Rising, The Wreath of Immor- 
telles, and the rest — the valetudinarian boy 
who spent much of his time in the seclusion 
of his bed-chamber, heaped about with manu- 
scripts — there came his cousin, the same with 
whom he had once played at the game of 
magic islands in the nursery, Mr R. A. M. 
Stevenson, recently emancipated from the Uni- 
versity of Cambridge. Mr R. A. M. Stevenson 
was the elder of the two, and he forthwith under- 
took (it seems) the education of his cousin Louis, 
in the modern city where the dying light of the 
old order still smouldered among discredited 
ashes. 

To know what you like [says Stevenson, writing in 
middle life,] is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 43 

Youth is vvholl}^ experimental. The essence and charm 
of that unquiet and dehghtful epoch is ignorance of self 
as well as ignorance of life. These two unknowns the 
young man brings together again and again, now in the 
airiest touch, now with a bitter hug ; now with exquisite 
pleasure, now with cutting pain ; but never with in- 
difference, to which he is a total stranger, and never 
with that near kinsman of indifference, contentment. 
... It is not beauty that he loves, nor pleasure that 
he seeks, though he may think so ; his design and his 
sufficient reward is to verify his own existence and taste 
the variety of human fate.^ 

And in verifying his own existence and tasting 
the variety of human fate — whatever these ex- 
pressions may connote — did Stevenson, together 
with his senior, spend the next two or three 
years : a period whose inner records were written 
in the sand, and survive not the waves of time.^ 

^ R. L. S., Later Essays. 

2 Mr Colvin's reference to these years {Dictionary of National 
Biography, art, " Stevenson, Robert Louis ") is, perhaps, a little 
misleading. No doubt the differences of which they were com- 
pounded were not all reputable. But it was a time of walking 
and canoeing as well as of drink and "jink" and the " L. J. R." 
(that mysterious and strange society ! ) ; and it took our author out 
of himself, it brought him face to face with life and character, it 
taught him to be something other than the " sedulous ape " of 
some one else, and (for his intimates were all talkers and moral- 
ists) it initiated and developed a practice of discussion and debate 
which left no theme of speculation unattempted nor many unex- 
hausted.— W. E. H. 



44 R- L- STEVENSON. 

Among his friends at this period were Mr 
Charles Baxter, the late Sir Walter Grindlay 
Simpson, Fleeming Jenkin, and James Walter 
Ferrier. Later, he came to know Mr Sidney 
Colvin ; and, a year or two afterwards, in the 
early days of 1875, he first met Mr W. E. 
Henley, who was then a patient in the Edin- 
burgh Old Infirmary. In the lines which I am 
so fortunate as to be allowed to print at the 
beginning of this volume, Mr Henley has deline- 
ated Robert Louis Stevenson as he knew him, in 
the beginning of a friendship which lasted long. 
And in his essay on Talk and Talkers (the 
first series) Stevenson has left a picture of the 
society of his friends. Their identity is masked 
under pseudonyms in the text ; but the matter is 
an open secret; and there is now no breach of 
confidence in discovering Burly as Mr W. E. 
Henley, Spring;- Hee I'd Jack as Mr R. A. M. 
Stevenson, Athelred and Cockshot as the late Sir 
W. G. Simpson and Fleeming Jenkin. In this 
society Stevenson learned to talk ; and it is 
upon record that he became a proficient in the 
art. At this time, too, he was a member of 
the Edinburgh Speculative Society. 

The Speculative Society [he says] is a body of some 
antiquity, and has counted among' its members Scott, 
Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant, 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE 45 

Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celebrity 
besides. By an accident, variously explained, it has 
its rooms in the very buildings of the University of 
Edinburgh : a hall, Turkey-carpeted, hung with pic- 
tures, looking, when lighted up at night with fire and 
candle, like some goodly dining-room ; a passage-like 
library, walled with books in their wire cages ; and a 
corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, many prints 
of famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues 
of a former secretary. Here a member can warm 
himself and loaf and read ; here, in defiance of the 
Senatus-consults, he can smoke. ^ 

And here it was that the Edinburgh University 
Magazine was founded by James Walter Ferrier, 
Robert Glasgow Brown, Stevenson himself, and 
another. Stevenson contributed six papers to 
the magazine, which are included in the Edin- 
burgh edition. The sixth, and last, An Old 
Scots Gardener, is included in his Memories and 
Portraits. The piece is highly tentative ; but to 
us (who know, 'tis true, the sequel) it seems to 
carry a promise of much greater things. It is, 

^ R. L. S., Mevtories and Portraits. And, " In the early 
seventies," says Miss Simpson, " Louis was twice president of 
the 'Speculative.' He wrote several papers for this society: 
The Influence of the Cmenanting Perseaition on the Scottish 
Mind (1S71) ; lYotes on ^Paradise Lost'' (1872); A'otes on the 
Nirteteenth Century, Two Questions in the Relations between 
Christ's Teaching and Modern Christianity (1873) ; Law and 
Free Will — Notes on the Duke of Argyll ^^ 



46 R. L. STEVENSON. 

at least, a considerable advance on the earlier 
attempts included in \htjiruenilia. 

Stevenson first appeared before the greater 
world in a little essay on Roads, which, after 
being refused by the Saturday Review, was pub- 
lished in the Portfolio for December 1893, and 
which was signed L. S. Stoneveit} By this time 
he had visited London, and had there become 
acquainted with writers whose names are familiar 
to us. And, by this time, in the intervals of 
his legal studies, he was already at work 
upon the first of those essays which were after- 
wards collected under the title of Familiar 
Studies of Men and Books. In 1875, in his 
twenty-fifth year, he went to France for a 
time, to the forest of Fontainebleau, where Mr 
R. A. M. Stevenson was then living in the 
painter-settlements. The visit was the first of 
several, and in his Fontainebleau'^ (and, inci- 
dentally, in The Wrecker) he has made a picture 
of these "village communities of painters"; 
and there is in Paris a. certain cafe, which 
owns a little room lined with paintings and 
opening upon the river, where M. Stevenson is 
still remembered. 

1 E. Blantyre Simpson, Robert' Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh 
Days. 

2 R. L. S., Later Essays. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 47 

The charm of Fontainebleau [he says] is a thing 
apart. It is a place that people love even more than 
they admire. The vigorous forest air, the silence, 
the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of 
tumbled boulders, the great age and dignity of certain 
groves — these are but ingredients, they are not the 
secret of the philtre. The place is sanative ; the air, 
the light, the perfumes, and the shapes of things con- 
cord in happy harmony. The artist may be idle and 
not fear the " blues." He may dally with his life 
. . . I was for some time a consistent Barbizonian ; 
ei ego in Arcadia vixi ; it was a pleasant season ; and 
that noiseless hamlet lying close among the borders of 
the wood is for me, as for so many others, a green 
spot in memory. The great Millet was just dead ; the 
green shutters of his modest house were closed ; his 
daughters were in mourning. The date of my first 
visit was thus an epoch in the history of art : in a 
lesser way it was an epoch in the history of the Latin 
Quarter. The Petit C/nacle was dead and buried ; 
Murger and his crew of sponging vagabonds were all 
at rest from their expedients ; the tradition of their 
real life was nearly lost ; and the petrified legend of 
the Vie de Bohcme had become a sort of gospel, and 
still gave the clue to zealous imitators.^ 

In the summer of the same year, 1875, Steven- 
son was called to the Bar, had a brass door-plate 
(at 17 Heriot Row) engraved with the legend 
" Robert Louis Stevenson, Advocate," and began 

^ R. L. S., Later Essays. 



48 R. L. STEVENSON. 

to pace the Parliament House in the mornings, 
according to the Scots custom in use among 
briefless advocates. Among the legal fry of 
Scotland, to whom he was known as " The Gifted 
Boy," Stevenson seems to have walked apart and 
solitary, nursing his soul. At this point, one , 
may observe that he was never popular in 
his native city. The society of Edinburgh 
courted him not, neither in his inglorious youth, 
nor his middle age of renown. "Edinburgh" 
. . . he says, " is a metropolitan small 
town ; where college professors and the lawyers 
of the Parliament House give the tone, and 
persons of leisure, attracted by educational 
advantages, make up much of the bulk of 
society." ^ He was not of that society, and 
that society knew it, as he knew it. Indeed, 
it is probable that the little fellowship I have 
enumerated made the whole of his visiting 
acquaintance in Edinburgh. Since the facts are 
common property, I need have no scruple in re- 
ferring to them. The coteries which had been 
accustomed to regard the Stevenson family with 
respect and esteem, declined to recognise the wil- 
ful eccentric who elected to drive down Princes 
Street (that classic thoroughfare) clothed in boat- 
ing flannels and a straw hat, upon a summer's 

^ R. L. S., Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 49 

afternoon ; ^ whose chosen attire in mid-winter 
was a pork-pie hat embroidered with silver, a 
velvet jacket, and a Spanish cloak ; ^ who wore 
his hair curling below the bottom of his advo- 
cate's wig ; who attended evening parties in a 
blue-black flannel shirt; and who (it is upon 
record) delighted to outrage the decorous con- 
ventions which govern " Anglified " Edinburgh. 
Stevenson did not waste overmuch time in the 
Parliament House. If he ever held a brief, 
which seems doubtful, he held but one ; for by 
this time he was fast wedded to literature. And, 
in 1876, we behold the Scot emancipated. 
In the publication of the Virginibus Ptierisque 
essays, Stevenson emerges at last from the difficult 
obscurity of his long probation, and unfurls his 
flag upon the capital city of his own peculiar 
country. The years have done their work ; by 
what way soever the young man travelled to his 



1 Margaret Moyes Black, R. Louis Stevenson. 

2 He came to an informal evening in these garments, and, in 
their lemoval, appeared in a dress-coat, a blue flannel shirt, a 
knitted tie, pepper-and-salt trousers, silk socks, and patent leather 
shoes (he was exceeding vain of his foot, which was neat and ele- 
gant). His hair fell to his collar; he waltzed, he talked, he ex- 
ploded, he was altogether wonderful. And the women (this would 
have touched him, had he known it) were in fits of laughter till 
— a whole Romantic Movement in his cloak and turban — he 
departed. To dream (it may be) over a sentence of Sir Thomas 
Browne's and a gin-and-ginger at Rutherford's. — W. E. H. 

4 



50 R. L. STEVENSON. 

own, he came to his own at last. As he was 
born a Stevenson and a Balfour, so he was 
born a theologian, a moralist, and a sectary — in 
a word, a " Shorter Catechist." And a Shorter 
Catechist he remains to the end, though he came 
to wear his rue with a difference. In the Vir- 
ginibus Puerisque essays, which might well be 
called, as the author thought at first of calling 
them, Zz/^ at Tzve7ity-Five,\h& sectary has broken 
his bonds and cast away his cords, has faced to 
the right-about, and is found laying down the 
law in gay contradiction. He is still, you ob- 
serve, promulgating morality — a morality with 
a difference — still a theologian and a moralist; 
and, to the last day of his life, the " Shorter 
Catechist" with inextinguishable zest, was em- 
ployed in finding and formulating a rule of con- 
duct — for himself and others, and for others still 
more than himself. And Virginihiis Puerisque, of 
which I shall have more to say, contains work of 
Stevenson's which remains unsurpassed by any- 
thing achieved by the artist in later life; and 
from that point he went straight forward. 

In the spring of this year (1876), he made the 
canoe trip through Belgium with Sir Walter 
Simpson, as related in An Inland Voyage ; and in 
the autumn he travelled in the Cevennes, as re- 
lated in the Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 5 1 

Neither of these two excellent little books brought 
profit to their author, nor did they, at the first, 
extend his fame beyond the immediate circle of 
his friends. During this year, also, Stevenson 
contributed to the Academy, Vanity Fair, and 
London, a weekly review founded in Sir Walter 
Simpson's rooms by Robert Glasgow Brown, and 
invented largely, if not wholly, by Stevenson and 
W. E. Henley. Soon afterwards, upon Brown's 
untimely death at Mentone, Mr Henley suc- 
ceeded to the conduct of the journal ; and it 
was during his reign that Stevenson contributed 
to London the brilliant series of TJie New 
Arabian Nights : a series which was supposed, 
by more than one of the proprietors of London, 
sufficiently to account for the unpopularity of 
their paper. Meanwhile, the essays of Familiar 
Studies of Meii and Books, and Stevenson's first 
published stories, A Lodging for the NigJit 
{Temple Bar), The Sire de Maletroifs Door 
(Temple Bar), and Providence and the Guitar 
(London), had appeared. About this time, also, 
the play Deacon Brodie was written in col- 
laboration with Mr Henley; and when he 
was seven- or eight - and -twenty, Stevenson 
wrote Will d the Mill, which remains, to the 
mind of the present writer at least, his highest 
achievement in literature. And early in 1879 



52 R. L. STEVENSON. 

(in his twenty-ninth year), while he was still in 
Edinburgh, he drafted (as Mr Colvin tells us), 
" but afterwards laid by, four chapters on ethics 
(a study to which he once referred as being al- 
ways his ' veiled mistress ') under the name of 
Lay Morals,'' which have been included in the 
Edinburgh Edition. 

In the summer of the same year, Stevenson 
found himself compelled to dififer from his 
father upon the crucial question of his mar- 
riage; and, in consequence of that unfortu- 
nate difference, he was left, for the first time, to 
gain his living by his own exertions. As yet, 
as I have said, outside the minority of persons 
interested in literature, the work of Stevenson, 
brilliant and personal as it was, went almost un- 
regarded ; and the prospects of the young author, 
who had by this time finally abandoned the law, 
were highly discouraging. The lady, an Ameri- 
can by birth, whom he desired to make his wife, 
Mrs Osbourne {n(fe Van de Grift), and whose ac- 
quaintance he had made in France, had returned 
to California. To the West, then, Stevenson 
resolved to go; and thither he went, travelling 
as an emigrant, by emigrant ship and emigrant 
train — a rude but satisfying experience for a 
romantic gentleman nurtured in comfort, and 
sufferinsf from uncertain health. Thus did 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 53 

he begin those travels and voyages which 
landed him at last, a lifelong exile, upon that 
" ultimate island " where he died. In The Ama- 
teur Emigrant he has written of his experi- 
ences : — 

As I walked the deck and looked round upon my 
fellow-passengers, ... I began for the first time 
to understand the nature of emigration. Day by day 
throughout the passage, and thenceforward across all 
the States, and on to the shores of the Pacific, this 
knowledge grew more clear and melancholy. Emi- 
gration, from a word of the most cheerful import, 
came to sound most dismally in my ear. 

It came, indeed, to sound most dismally ere 
the author arrived at his journey's end, for the 
misery and discomfort set a heavy strain upon 
his frail constitution. But he spent his time in 
making acquaintance with his fellow-passengers, 
in studying them, and sitting down to moralise 
his observations on paper, and making pictur- 
esque notes of the voyage, until the deserts are 
crossed, and " few people have praised God more 
happily than I did," he says. And — 

The day was breaking as we crossed the ferry ; the 
fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco ; 
the bay was perfect — not a ripple, scarce a stain, upon 
its blue expanse ; everything was waiting, breathless, 



54 R- L. STEVENSON. 



^ 



for the sun. A spot of cloudy gold lit first upon the 
head of Tamalpais, and then widened downward on 
its shapely shoulder ; the air seemed to awaken, and 
began to sparkle ; and suddenly 

" The tall hills Titan discovered," 

and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and 
corn, were lit from end to end with summer daylight. 

The Amateur Emigrant knows how to write a 
piece of description — a landscape in sunrise — ■ 
you perceive. Nevertheless, he had but scant suc- 
cess in obtaining work upon the American jour- 
nals. " On the whole, his work was not thought 
up to Californian standards,"^ says Mr Colvifi, 
with cutting irony. During the eight months 
v^hich Stevenson spent " partly at Monterey and 
partly at San Francisco," ^ he fell a victim to one 
of those severe attacks of illness to which he was 
thenceforward liable ; yet, with the strenuous 
courage which was a main virtue of Stevenson's 
character, he " managed, nevertheless, to write 
the story of The Pavilion on the Links, two or 
three essays for the Cornhill Magazine, ... a 
first draft of the romance of Prince Otto, and the 
two parts of The Amateur Emigrant!' ^ 

^ Dictmiary of A^ational Biography: art., "Stevenson, Robert 
Louis." 

2 Ibid. 8 iifid. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 55 

In the meantime, Mrs Osbourne had obtained 
a divorce from her husband; and in the spring 
of 1880, when Stevenson was in his thirty-first 
year, Mrs Van de Grift was married to him. 
With the boy Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, Mrs 
Stevenson's son, the two went to live for a time 
at Juan Silverado, the site of an old mining- 
camp above Calistoga, in the Californian coast 
range. Here, from TJie Silverado Squatters^ is 
Stevenson's description of the place : — 

For about a furlong we followed a good road along 
the hillside through the forest, until suddenly that 
road widened out and came abruptly to an end. A 
canon, woody below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, 
v/as here walled across by a clump of rolling stones, 
dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in 
height. A rusty iron chute on wooden legs came 
flying, like a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet. 
It was down this that they poured the precious ore ; 
and below here the carts stood to wait their lading, 
and carry it mill-ward down the mountain. The 
whole cailon was so entirely blocked, as if by some 
rude guerilla fortification, that we could only mount 
by lengths of wooden ladder, fixed in the hillside. 
These led us round the farther corner of the clump ; 
and when they were at an end we still persevered 
over loose rubble and wading deep in poison-oak, till 
we struck a triangular platform, filling up the whole 
glen, and shut in on either hand by bold projections 



56 R. L. STEVENSON. 

of the mountain. Only in front the place was open 
like the proscenium of a theatre, and we looked forth 
into a great realm of air, and down upon tree-tops and 
hill-tops, and far and near on wild and varied country. 
The place still stood as on the day it was deserted : a 
line of iron rails with a bifurcation ; a truck in working 
order ; a world of lumber, old wood, old iron ; a black- 
smith's forge on one side, half-buried in the leaves of 
dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown 
wooden house . . ? 

How Stevenson and his wife and stepson lived 
in that old brovi^n vi^ooden house for several sunny 
months, may be read at length in T/ie Silverado 
Squatters. Meanwhile, the family difference 
before referred to was brought to a happy conclu- 
sion, and in August of the same year, 1880, the 
Stevensons came home to Scotland. Six weeks 
later, for health's sake, they went to Davos. 
Here they made acquaintance with John Ad- 
din gton Symonds (the Opal stein of Talk and 
Talkers') and his family; and here it was that 
Stevenson and his stepson amused themselves 
by designing, and printing upon a little press of 
their own, such trifles as the Not /, and other 
Poems, the Black Canyon, the Moral Emblems, 
now included in the supplementary volume to 
the Edinburgh Edition. 

^ R. L. S., The Silverado Squatters. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 57 

In May of next year, 188 r, the Stevensons 
again returned to Scotland, living, for four 
months, at Pitlochry and Braemar. At this time 
Stevenson wrote TJira'W}i Janet, one of the 
grisliest of his short stories, and a first draft of 
The Merry Men. In August, acting in part upon 
the advice of the retiring Professor of History 
and Constitutional Law in Edinburgh, Sheriff 
^neas Mackay, he became a candidate for the 
vacant chair; but his candidature was declined. 
And at this time also he began Treasure Island, 
which remains, in some ways, the best of his 
longer works, even as its writing marked a defi- 
nite stage in his career. 

It was far indeed from being my first book, for I 
am not a novelist alone [says he, writing in a popular 
magazine some twelve years later]. But I am well 
aware that my paymaster, the Great Public, regards 
what else I have written with indifference, if not aver- 
sion . . . Sooner or later, somehow, anyhow, I 
was bound to write a novel. It seems vain to ask 
why . . . although I had attempted the thing 
with vigour not less than ten or twelve times, I had 
not yet written a novel. All — all my pretty ones — 
had gone for a little, and then stopped inexorably like 
a schoolboy's watch. I might be compared to a 
cricketer of many years' standing who should never 
have made a run ... In the fated year I came 
to live with my father and mother at . . . Braemar. 



58 R. L. STEVENSON. 

There it blew a good deal and rained in a proportion ; 
my native air was more unkind than man's ingratitude, 
and I must consent to pass a good deal of my time 
between four walls in a house lugubriously known as 
the Late Miss McGregor's Cottage. And now admire 
the finger of predestination. There was a schoolboy '■ 
in the Late Miss McGregor's Cottage, home from the 
holidays, and much in want of " something craggy to 
break his mind upon." He had no thought of litera- 
ture ; it was the art of Raphael that received his 
fleeting suffrages ; and with the aid of pen and ink 
and a shilling box of water-colours, he had soon turned 
one of the rooms into a picture-gallery. My imme- 
diate duty towards the gallery was to be showman ; but 
I would sometimes unbend a little, join the artist (so 
to speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon with 
him in a generous emulation, making coloured draw- 
ings. On one of these occasions I made the map of 
an island ; it was elaborately and (I thought) beauti- 
fully coloured ; the shape of it took my fancy beyond 
expression ; it contained harbours that pleased me like 
sonnets ; and, with the unconsciousness of the predes- 
tined, I ticketed my performance " Treasure Island " 
. . . No child but must remember laying his head 
in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and 
seeing it grow populous with fairy armies. Somewhat 
in this way, as I paused upon my map of " Treasure 
Island," the future character of the book began to 
appear there visibly among imaginary woods ; and 
their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon 
1 Samuel Lloyd Osbourne. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 59 

me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and 
fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square 
inches of a flat projection. The next thing I knew I 
had some papers before me and was writing out a list 
of chapters ... It seems as though a full-grown 
experienced man of letters might engage to turn out 
Treasure Island at so many pages a day, and keep his 
pipe alight. But, alas ! this was not my case. Fifteen 
days I stuck to it, and turned out fifteen chapters ; 
and then, in the early paragraphs of the sixteenth, 
ignominiously lost hold. My mouth was empty ; 
there was not one word of Treasure Island in my 
bosom ; and here were the proofs of the beginning 
already waiting me at the " Hand and Spear." Then 
I corrected them, living for the most part alone, walk- 
ing on the heath at Weybridge in dewy autumn morn- 
ings, a good deal pleased with what I had done, and 
more appalled than I can depict to you in words at 
what remained for me to do. I was thirty-one ; I 
was the head of a family ; I had lost my health ; I 
had never yet paid my way, never yet made ;^200 a- 
year ; my father had quite recently bought back and 
cancelled a book * that was judged a failure : was this 
to be another and last fiasco ? I was indeed very close 
on despair; but I shut my mouth hard, and during 
the journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter, 
had the resolution to think of other things and bury 
myself in the novels of M. du Boisgobey. Arrived at 
my destination, down I sat one morning to the un- 
finished tale ; and behold ! it flowed from me like 
^ The Amateur Emigrant. 



60 R. L. STEVENSON. 

small-talk ; and in a second tide of delighted industry, 
and again at the rate of a chapter a-day, I finished 
Treasure Jsla?id} 

Thus the author, writing, in the days of his 
success, of the days when he was yet unknown 
to fame. These confidential reminiscences seem 
better fitted for the pages of a private letter than 
for the columns of a popular magazine. But 
there these records are ; and, such as they are, 
we find them interesting, and significant of the 
writer's character. The singular lack of reti- 
cence which induced a man of letters of Steven- 
son's eminence thus to respond to the request 
of a popular magazine for a piece of private 
history, and the curious fitful working — the 
"broken tenacity" — of a mind whose talent 
lay always in dealing with episode, never with 
a lengthy and complicated narrative, which are 
here revealed, discover to us two essential char- 
acteristics of the man's temperament. 

Stevenson finished Treasnre Island at Davos 
during the winter of 1881-82; in the following 
summer he returned to Scotland, whence he 
journeyed south for the winter, taking up his 
quarters near Marseilles. In January 1883 he 
removed his household to a chdlet, " Chalet la 
Solitude," near Hyeres. Meanwhile Treasure 
^ R. L. S., Juvenilia, &'c. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 6l 

Island had run its serial course in Voting Folks' 
Paper (at thirty shillings a chapter, I am told), 
and had appeared as a volume. The book made 
Stevenson's first popular success^ — one of those 
sudden, extraordinary popular successes which 
so often perplex and confound the critical ; but, 
in this case, every one bought the book for the 
adequate reason that it was good story, brilliantly 
told. 

While he lived in the south, Stevenson wrote 
the Treasiire of Franchard, a short story which 
seems, to me, to express one aspect of a many- 
sided temperament as completely as Will d the 
Mill gives expression to another ; and The Black 
Arrow, a story of adventure written to succeed 
Treasure Island in Yonng Folks' Paper. The 
readers of Yonng Folks' Paper, it is said, cared 
little for Treasure Island ; but they were thought 
to like The Black Arrow. 

In the eyes of readers who thought less than nothing 
of Treasure Island [says the author, in one of those 
dedications which afford a perennial pleasure to read]. 
The Black Arroiv was supposed to mark a clear 
advance. Those who read volumes and those who 
read story papers belong to different worlds. The 
verdict on Treasure Island was reversed in the other 
court : I wonder, will it be the same with its successor? 

1 It enchanted the proprietor of The Times, and drew a post- 
card from Mr Gladstone. 



62 R. L. STEVENSON. 

The verdict was reversed — so variable a thing is 
the thermometer of popular taste. At this time, 
also, Stevenson was writing essays for The Corn- 
hill (in which periodical the Virginibiis Puerisque 
series had first appeared), and for The Magazine 
of Art, which was then edited by Mr Hen- 
ley. He was, also, preparing for serial publi- 
cation Pri^tce Otto, which had been drafted two 
or three years before. His work suffered an 
interruption during almost the whole of the 
ensuing year, 1884, for, while still in the south, 
Stevenson was again attacked by serious illness ; 
and returning to England, he settled in the 
autumn at Bournemouth. There, in divers lodg- 
ings, he wrote the first and best of his Child's 
Garden, together with his share of Beau Austin 
and Admiral Guinea. And then, early in 1885, 
his father presented him with the house in which 
he lived until 1887, and which he called Skerry- 
vore, after the noble and beautiful lighthouse 
designed and built by his uncle, Alan Stevenson. 

For love of lovely words, and for the sake 
Of those, my kinsmen and my countrymen. 
Who early and late in the windy ocean toiled 
To plant a star for seamen, where was then 
The surfy haunt of seals and cormorants : 
I, on the lintel of this cot, inscribe 
The name of a strong tovver.i 

1 R. L. S., Utiderivoods. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 63 

The while he dwelt in Skerryvore, " he was 
never," says Mr Colvin, " free for many weeks 
together from fits of haemorrhage and prostra- 
tion." At this time, again, it seems that 
he must work under the disabilities of the 
invalid. Nevertheless, he continued to pursue 
his vocation with " unfaltering and delighted 
industry." In this year (the thirty-fifth of his 
age) he completed The Child's Garden of Verses, 
and stringently revised Prince Otto (it had 
been written six or seven times ere it got into 
Longman' s Magazine^) before the final appearance 
of the story as a volume. He began The Great 
North Road, a promising fragment which is in- 
cluded in the Edinburgh Edition ; he wrote, with 
Mrs Stevenson, the second series of The New 
Arabiafi Nights ; he wrote sundry essays ; several 
Christmas stories — stories, that is to say, which 
appeared in Christmas numbers of various peri- 
odicals — The Body Snatcher (not republished), 
Olalla, The Misadvetitures of John Nicholson, and 
Markheim ; and about this period he and Mr 
Henley remodelled Deacon Brodie and wrote 

1 And, even after so much revision, there may be found in the 
text of Longman' s Magazine a deal of blank verse : which leads 
us to remark that blank verse written in the place of prose is, 
not necessarily the result of careless workmanship (as some have 
vainly dreamed), nor even of fatigue but, merely the natural 
outcome of strong emotion. 



64 R- L. STEVENSON. 

Robert Macaire. His books, meanwhile, had 
brought him scant increase of fame or profit. 
(Mr Colvin tells us that, until 1886, his thirty- 
sixth year, Stevenson had never earned much 
more than ^^300 a-year: a record one would 
commend to the literary aspirant for his par- 
ticular consideration.) But, in 1886, he achieved 
a second popular victory, in The Sirajige Case of 
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. That extraordinary 
little work incidentally appealed, not only to 
that side of the British temperament which 
demands entertainment but, to the moral, 
or religious, element inherent in the national 
character, — that element to which no appeal, 
high or low, righteous or fantastic or hysterical, 
is ever wholly vain. The clergy at large espied 
another opportunity for pressing a secular phe- 
nomenon into the service of the sanctuary; 
and Dr Jekyll was captured and turned to great 
account as a pulpit metaphor. And there was 
one ingenious gentleman at least, who, living at 
Bournemouth, profited by a number of sermons 
which he never heard. For, every one bought 
and read Dr Jekyll; and, together with Kidnapped, 
reprinted from Young Folks Paper about the same 
time, the little book considerably increased Ste- 
venson's reputation. His name, as such, became 
of monetary value, a signature coveted of pub- 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 65 

lishers; and, from henceforth, his income was 
largely augmented. 

Of Stevenson's comrades of Edinburgh days, 
days from which, by time and chance and 
change, he was already far removed, several 
had gone the way of all men ; in Old Mortality, 
he had already commemorated James Walter 
Ferrier; and now, in 1886, he came to write 
the biography of Professor Fleeming Jenkin, 
Then, in May of the following year, his father 
died ; and the death of Thomas Stevenson made 
one of the reasons which sent him upon his 
second long exile, which his own death ended. 
His ill-health made another; and, says Mr 
Colvin, " his wife's connections pointing to 
the west, he thought of Colorado, persuaded 
his mother to join them, and with his whole 
household — mother, wife, and stepson — sailed 
for New York on 17 Aug. 1887." At first 
the family stayed at Newport, then they settled 
for a time at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, 
then Stevenson came to New York for a little 
while, and then, leaving the city, he " went for 
some weeks boating to Manasquan on the New 
Jersey coast." ^ During this time, from August 
1887 to May 1888, he had written Ticonderoga, 

1 Dictionary of A^ational BiograJ^ky : art., " Stevenson, Robert 
Louis." 



66 R. L. STEVENSON. 

and a series of twelve essays for Scribner's 
Magazine, had begun The Master of Ballajiirae, 
and had completed, together with his stepson 
Mr Lloyd Osbourne, the narrative farce, The 
Wrong Box. 

Writing to Mr Colvin upon the aspect of 
Piilvis et Umbra and the didactic pieces among 
the Scribner essays, Stevenson says : " I agree 
with you the lights seem a little turned down ; 
the truth is I was far through, and came none 
too soon to the South Seas, where I was to 
recover peace of body and mind. And how- 
ever low the lights, the stuff is true." ^ If the 
lights were low, they burned with radiance — 
a radiance which can only be described as lurid; 
but as to that I shall have more to say. And, 
in a fragment of an essay, written four or five 
years later, the author tells us how he came to 
begin The Master of Ballantrae, that sinister, 
disjointed, powerful work: — 

I was walking one night in the verandah of a small 
house in which I lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. 
It was winter ; the night was very dark ; the air extra- 
ordinary clear and cold, and sweet with the purity of 
forests. From a good way below, the river was to be 
heard contending with ice and boulders : a few lights 

^ R. L. S., Across the Plains. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 6/ 

appeared, scattered unevenly among the darkness, but 
so far away as not to lessen the sense of isolation. 
For the making of a story here were fine conditions. 
I was, besides, moved with the spirit of emulation, for 
I had just finished my third or fourth perusal of The 
Phantom Ship. " Come," said I to my engine, " let 
us make a tale, a story of many years and countries, of 
the sea and the land, savagery and civilisation ; a story 
that shall have the same large features, and may be 
treated in the same summary elliptic method as the 
book you have been reading and admiring "... 
There cropped up in my memory a singular case of 
a buried and resuscitated fakir, which I had been often 
told by an uncle of mine, then lately dead, Inspector- 
General John Balfour. 

On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the 
thermometer below zero, the brain works with much 
vivacity ; and the next moment I had seen the circum- 
stance transplanted from India and the tropics to the 
Adirondack wilderness and the stringent cold of the 
Canadian border. Here then, almost before I began 
my story, I had two countries, two of the ends of the 
earth involved ; and thus though the notion of the 
resuscitated man failed entirely on the score of general 
acceptation, or even (as I have since found) accep- 
tability, it fitted at once with my design of a tale of 
many lands ; and this decided me to consider further 
of its possibihties.i 

Now, in the spring of 1888 (when Stevenson 

1 R. L. 'ii., Juvenilia, ^c. 



68 R. L. STEVENSON. 

was in his thirty-eighth year), comes Mr S. S. 
McClure, the American publisher, offering Ste- 
venson ^2000 to cruise in the South Seas, and 
to write the story of his voyages in a series 
of letters. He accepted the offer; and in 
June the Stevenson family set sail from San 
Francisco in the schooner yacht Casco, Captain 
Otis, for the Marquesas Islands ; thence to the 
Paumotus ; thence to the Society Islands ; and 
thence northward to Honolulu. The whole 
cruise lasted about six months. Here, from 
The Wrecker (which work was begun at sea 
about this time), is Stevenson's picture of his 
first sailing into those desired waters: — 

I love to recall the glad monotony of a Pacific 
voyage, when the trades are not stinted, and the ship, 
day after day, goes free. The mountain scenery of 
trade- wind clouds, watched . . . under every vicis- 
situde of light — blotting stars, withering in the moon's 
glory, barring the scarlet eve, lying across the dawn 
collapsed into the unfeatured morning bank, or at 
noon raising their snowy summits between the blue 
roof of heaven and the blue floor of sea; the small, 
busy, and deliberate world of the schooner, with its unfa- 
miliar scenes, the spearing of dolphin from the bowsprit 
end, the holy war on sharks, the cook making bread on 
the main hatch ; reefing down before a violent squall, 
with the men hanging out on the foot-ropes ; the 
squall itself, the catch at the heart, the opened sluices 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 69 

of the sky; and the relief, the renewed loveliness of 
life, when all is over, the sun forth again, and our out- 
fought enemy only a blot upon the leeward sea. I 
love to recall, and would that I could reproduce that 
life, the unforgettable, the unrememberable. The mem- 
ory, which shows so wise a backwardness in regis- 
tering pain, is besides an imperfect recorder of ex- 
tended pleasures ; and a long-continued wellbeing 
escapes (as it were, by its mass) our petty methods 
of commemoration. On a part of our life's map 
there lies a roseate, undecipherable haze, and that 
is all. 

Of one thing, if I am at all to trust my own annals, 
I was delightedly conscious. Day after day, in the sun- 
gilded cabin, the whisky-dealer's thermometer stood at 
84°. Day after day the air had the same indescribable 
liveliness and sweetness, soft and nimble, and cool as 
the cheek of health. Day after day the sun flamed ; 
night after night the moon beaconed, or the stars 
paraded their lustrous regiment. I was aware of a 
spiritual change, or, perhaps, rather a molecular re- 
constitution. My bones were sweeter to me. I had 
come home to my own climate, and looked back with 
pity on those damp and wintry zones miscalled the 
temperate.'^ 

The Stevensons remained at Honolulu for 
some six months, and during this time Ste- 
venson made a visit to the leper island of 
Molokai. From Honolulu they set sail upon 

1 R. L. S., The Wrecker. 



70 R. L. STEVENSON. 

a second cruise, just a year from the time they 
started from San Francisco. 

Hence [says Stevenson], lacking courage to return to 
my old life of the house and sick-room, I set forth to 
leeward in a trading schooner, the Equator, of a little 
over seventy tons, spent four months among the atolls 
(low coral islands) oi the Gilbert group, and reached 
Samoa towards the close of '89. By that time grati- 
tude and habit were beginning to attach me to the 
islands ; I had gained a competency of strength ; I 
had made friends ; I had learned new interests ; the 
time of my voyages had passed hke days in fairyland ; 
and I decided to remain.^ 

So, for another six months, the Equator tramps 
among the islands, visiting the Gilberts, and 
fetching up about Christmas time, 1889, at 
Apia near Samoa, where the Stevensons stayed 
for some weeks. Here Stevenson bought an 
estate of some four hundred acres, and called 
it Vailima; and here he wrote The Bottle Imp, 
the first of his Pacific yarns. Thence, they 
sailed to Sydney, where Stevenson, falling ill 
again, lost for a time his new-found health. 
While at Sydney, he wrote the Open Letter"^ 
(printed in that Scots Observer, which, during 
its conduct by Mr Henley, established a new 

* R. L. S., In the South Seas. 
2 R. L. S., Later Essays. 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 7 1 

tradition in literature, in criticism, and in 
journalism ; and contended, single-handed, for 
certain ideals which the nation, though it 
draws from changed sources which claim the 
inspiration as their own, is at last adopting) to 
the Reverend Dr Hyde of Honolulu in which 
that clergyman receives an unsparing casti- 
gation. Dr Hyde had — or Stevenson thought 
he had, for, after all, the matter seems a shade 
doubtful — written a letter to a brother ecclesi- 
astic, containing gross imputations upon the 
character of Father Damien, the leper evan- 
gelist, which awoke Stevenson to vengeful indig- 
nation, and moved him to produce a piece of 
capital invective. 

A happier reminiscence of Sydney, for whose 
record I am indebted to the kindness of Mr 
Rudyard Kipling, remains in the letters ad- 
dressed by Mr Alan Breck Stuart to one Ter- 
ence Mulvaney. The fame of the said Terence 
Mulvaney has reached Mr Stuart (he says) even 
in that antipodean city; Mr Mulvaney is in the 
service, as it appears to Mr Stuart, of a man 
with a strange name, to whom (Mr Stuart is of 
opinion) he was sent directly from the Almighty. 
To this flattering effusion Mr Mulvaney re- 
sponded in suitable terms ; whereupon Mr Stuart 
incontinently despatches a cartel to Mr Mul- 



72 R. L. STEVENSON. 

vaney: he challenges him to make music or to 
fight — to pipes or broadswords — or both ; and if 
both, then the pipes first and broadswords after, 
or broadswords first and (if the parties survive) 
pipes after; just whichever Mr Mulvaney pleases; 
although — so far as Mr Stuart is able to make 
out — Mr Mulvaney is not of the dtiaine-uasal 
(^Anglice, of gentle rank), nor does he hold 
His Majesty's commission; and therefore, he 
is scarce of a rank with Alan Breck, who bears 
a king's name. Nevertheless, having in mind 
Mr Mulvaney's indubitable prowess, and the fact 
of his bearing honourable service to the man of 
the strange name aforesaid, Mr Stuart, for the 
pleasure of meeting Mr Mulvaney, is willing 
(as he says) to overlook these disabilities. 

From Sydney, in April 1890, the Stevensons 
sailed again in the trading steamer Janet Nicoll. 
Aboard the Janet Nicoll, Stevenson began the 
series of letters for Mr McClure, which were 
eventually published in the New York Sun, and, 
in England, in Black and White, selections from 
them being presented in the Edinburgh Edition in 
In the South Seas. They exhibit the Scot abroad 
in a somewhat dreary aspect. They are pictur- 
esque and skilfully written, as all of Stevenson's 
work must be ; yet the author seems wilfully to 
ignore all of Polynesian life which might not have 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 73 

been set forth by a missionary discoursing at a 
tea-party. It is hard to beHeve that In the South 
Seas was written by the same hand which indited 
the earHer Stevensonian essays and stories — the 
hand, even, that wrote The Beach of Falcsd about 
the same time. In truth, it is likely that a 
vision of more humane and catholic comprehen- 
sion was requisite in dealing with the Islanders 
than was possessed by the " Shorter Catechist" 
in his austerer middle age. Instead of the man 
whose eyes had been opened, it is " John Calvin 
come alive again," and patrolling the isles of the 
blest. 

During the summer of 1890, the Janet Nicoll 
carried the Stevensons from Sydney and Auck- 
land to the Penrhyn Islands, thence to the 
Union Islands, the Ellice Islands, and north- 
ward to the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, 
thence back again by New Caledonia, Sydney, 
and Auckland to Apia, where they landed in 
September. There, upon his estate of Vailima, 
Stevenson settled with his family. During his 
voyages, he had completed The Master of Bal- 
lantrae, had written sundry verses (included in 
Songs of Travel^ two dreary ballads of Poly- 
nesian legend, The Song of RaJiero and The 
Feast of Famine, had produced (at Samoa) The 
Bottle Imp, and (at Sydney) the Letter to Dr 



74 R- L- STEVENSON. 

Hyde, had begun the South Sea Letters, and, 
with Mr Lloyd Osbourne, TJie Wrecker. When 
he entered upon his residence at Samoa the 
Letters and TJie Wrecker were still unfinished ; 
while upon the new estate there were clear- 
ing and planting, and the completion of the 
house to be superintended ; and how he settled 
down to cope with these labours, may be read 
at large in the Vailijiia Letters addressed to 
Mr Sidney Colvin, and published in the Edin- 
burgh Edition. In the following spring (1891), 
Mrs Stevenson the elder became a member of 
the Stevensonian household ; Stevenson's step- 
daughter, Mrs Strong, had joined the party two 
years before ; and thus, with his mother, wife, 
stepdaughter, and stepson, with two serious 
tasks to complete, an estate to lay out and a 
house to build, we behold Stevenson cheerfully 
entering upon those four arduous years in the 
Pacific which were the last of his life. 

At first, his health seemed almost entirely 
restored to him, and he accomplished a really 
amazing amount of work without distress. He 
writes for six or eight hours a-day, pioneers his 
estate, rides, boats, and lavishly entertains the 
island population generally, both brown and 
white. They called him Tusitala, the teller of 
tales ; and indeed, albeit his knowledge of South 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 75 

Sea life and the South Sea tongues was never 
more than a smattering, he liked to pose as 
a kind of a bard, and feudal chieftain. And 
in the summer of 1891, when the political 
troubles of the island, the offspring of German 
officialism and native intrigue, began to threaten 
war, Stevenson, plunging gaily into that vexed 
and complicated business, drew his sword upon 
the side of the oppressed in his letters to The 
Times} There was none to outvie the practised 
writer in that exercise; and, in consequence of 
his exposures, the three treaty Powers (Great 
Britain, the United States, and Germany) were 
constrained to withdraw from their protectorate 
the Chief Justice, Mr Cedercrantz, and the Presi- 
dent of the Council, Baron Senfift von Pilsach. 
The whole story of shifty diplomacy and native 
civil war may be read in Stevenson's Footnote to 
History, a monograph which, on the top of all 
his other enterprises, he thought it his duty to 
undertake during 1892; and a curious and in- 
structive work it is. The methods of the histo- 
rian and of the novelist, as Stevenson himself 
somewhere observes, are often, ultimately, very 
much the same; and the professional historian, 
ostensibly recording chronicles, sometimes sets 
forth what is neither more nor less than a novel 

1 R. L. S., Letters from Samoa. 



'j6 R. L. STEVENSON. 

in disguise. And, in A Footnote to History we 
observe the professional novelist engaged in writ- 
ing history in little, with results highly charac- 
teristic of the writer. 

In 1 891 The Wrecker was completed, and, later 
in the year, the South Sea Letters. Besides writ- 
ing the Footnote to History during the ensuing 
year, Stevenson began Catriona, the sequel to 
Kidnapped, which had been written six years 
before; The Ebb-Tide, in collaboration with Mr 
Lloyd Osbourne; Heathercat} The Young CJieva- 
lier} Weir of Hermiston} and A Family of Engi- 
neers} a short biography of the Stevenson ancestry. 
Of these, only Catriona and The Ebb-Tide were 
completed. 

It is evident from the Vailima Letters that, by 
this time, Stevenson was habitually overworking 
himself. To certain temperaments, working 
under certain conditions, there comes a time 
when they cannot stop ; to rest is no longer in 
their power; and only death will bring cessation. 
Moreover, though Stevenson was earning an in- 
come which, for a man of letters, was large, his 
expenses, by his own account, continued to keep 
pace with his earnings. And, besides his proper 
work, this fiery thread-paper of a man was build- 

1 R. L. S., Weir of Hermiston and other Fragments. 
^ R. L. S., A Family of Engineers, 



OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 7/ 

ing, farming, colonising, working with his hands, 
and dabbling in politics — a highly exhausting 
dissipation. And, one way and another, the 
Vailima Letters inevitably disengage the impres- 
sion that the man was driven, that — whether 
by habit or by need, for what cause soever — 
Stevenson, in these last years, was toiling under 
the lash. His work cost him more than he 
had any right to give, more than, in his earlier 
years, he would ever have consented to give. 
Besides, as a man of letters, he had no super- 
fluous strength wherewith to drive two or three 
other trades. That the estate of Vailima 
would come in time to yield a sufficient main- 
tenance, thus releasing him from the imme- 
diate necessity for toil, was his constant hope. 
Meanwhile — 

I must own [he writes in December 1893] "that I 
have overworked bitterly — overworked — there, that 's 
legible. My hand is a thing that was, and in the 
meanwhile so are my brains. And here, in the very 
midst, comes a plausible scheme to make Vaihma pay, 
which will perhaps let me into considerable expense 
just when I don't want it.^ 

In the previous January (1893) Stevenson's 
health had again suffered severely from an attack 
of influenza, from which, in all probability, it 
^ R. L. S., Vailima Letters. 



78 R. L. STEVENSON. 

never fully recovered. Prostrated by sickness, 
he began to dictate St Ives from his bed; and 
when his voice failed, he continued to dictate 
upon his fingers. Taking into consideration 
the circumstances in which it was composed, 
St Ives is a piece of heroism. It might be 
supposed that a novelist and man of letters of 
established repute would, at forty-three, begin 
to take a little ease. Stevenson never did. 
Whatever the reason in the background, he 
conceived it his duty to spur his ailing flesh 
to the last ounce; and, to his honour be it 
said, he fulfilled that conception to the letter. 
In the winter of 1894 he turned from St Ives 
to continue Weir of Heruiiston ; and the last 
sentence of that fragment contains the last 
words he ever wrote. " On the afternoon of 
4 Dec. 1894, he was talking gaily with his wife, 
when the sudden rupture of a blood-vessel in 
the brain laid him at her feet, and within two 
hours all was over." ^ 

So Robert Louis Stevenson, whose first pub- 
lished essay was rejected by the Saturday Review, 
came into his own peculiar kingdom at last; 
and died ; and was buried upon the summit of 
Mount Vaea, in the island of his last exile, 

1 Dictionary of National Biography : art., " Stevenson, Robert 
Louis." 



IV. 

THE MORALIST. 

. . . Life, my old shipmate, life, at any moment and in any 
view, is as dangerous as a sinking ship ; and yet it is man's hand- 
some fashion to carry umbrellas, to wear indiarubber overshoes, 
to begin vast works, and to conduct himself in every way as if he 
might hope to be eternal. And for my own poor part I should 
despise the man who, even on board a sinking ship, should omit 
to take a pill or to wind up his watch. That, my friend, would 
not be the human attitude. — R. L. S., Fables. 

Doctor Desprez always rose early. Before the smoke arose, 
before the first cart rattled over the bridge to the day's labour in 
the fields, he was to be found wandering in his garden. Now he 
would pick a bunch of grapes ; now he would eat a big pear 
under the trellis ; now he would draw all sorts of fancies on the 
path with the end of his cane ; now he would go down and 
watch the river running endlessly past the timber landing-place 
at which he moored his boat. There was no time, he used to 
say, for making theories like the early morning. — R. L. S., 
The Treasure of Franchard. 

There is no time, indeed, for making theories 
like the early morning. In his early youth 
Stevenson acquired that seductive habit, which 
remained a passion with him to the end. And 
the method of his philosophy was ever the same. 
" When I was a boy," said his Will o' the Mill, 



■80 R. L. STEVENSON. 

" I was a bit puzzled, and hardly knew whether 
it was myself or the world that was curious and 
worth looking into. Now, I know it is myself, 
and stick to that." Stevenson wrote Will <?.' the 
Mill when he was seven- or eight-and-twenty, 
when his Edinburgh days of college, of engineer- 
ing, of law, of "jink," and the rest, were done; 
when the term of his nameless, self-ordained 
apprenticeship had expired ; and after the pub- 
lication of the Virginibtis Puerisque essays and 
the two small books of travel. To me, at least, 
that melancholy and beautiful fable is the best 
of Stevenson, and resumes his whole ideal 
philosophy of life. It is highly abstract and 
visionary, to be sure ; but there are a wonderful 
feeling for beauty, an extraordinary imaginative 
perception, and the whole is informed with a 
sort of fatalism, hopeless yet courageous, which 
the English mind sets to the account of the 
Celtic temperament. 

The Treasure of Franchard, written some five 
years later, when the author was living in the 
south of France (where, as he says in later life, 
he was really " happy " — for once), embraces a 
more smiling picture of the ideal Stevenson in 
Dr Desprez, that unstable and meticulous phil- 
osopher. Hark to the professor of the Art of 
Life. "We hardly know anything, my man. 



THE MORALIST. 8 1 

until we try to learn. Interrogate your conscious- 
ness^' cries the sage. Deeply in love with the 
" appearances of life," profoundly interested in 
their effect upon himself, Stevenson was for ever 
exploring his consciousness; and, with a sort of 
naive egoism, he has made the whole reading 
world partaker in the fruits of that fantastic 
country. 

First and foremost and always, be it remem- 
bered, Stevenson was an artist, a maker. He 
was entirely employed in making works of art. 
Out of the stuff of life to fashion something, to 
produce an effect — this was his one absorbing 
occupation. All else might be well or ill — it was 
by the way, and of little moment ; and although 
there were exceptions, times when the generosity 
of the man compelled his partner, the exclusive 
artist, to descend into the arena, as in the leading 
instances of the Stevensonian intervention on 
behalf of the luckless Samoans, harried and 
bought and sold by German officials, and the 
small-sword parade in the matter of Father 
Damien and the " Reverend Dr Hyde of Hono- 
lulu," yet, even then, we find the champion 
lamenting that the conditions of combat pre- 
vented him from producing (what he called) 
literature. " I do not go in for literature ; ad- 
dress myself to sensible people rather than to 

6 



82 R. L. STEVENSON. 

sensitive," he says ; and, " there is not even a 
good sentence in it" {A Footjwte to History), 
"but perhaps — I don't know — it may be found 
an honest, clear volume." ^ One may note in 
passing that he is here quite inconsistent with 
his own express definitions of the scope of 
literature, to be found elsewhere in his works ; 
but Stevenson was far too clever an artist to be 
fettered by his own theories. And, indeed, I 
think that the man of letters does not live, who 
might not feel a just satisfaction in the author- 
ship of that volume deprecated by its author, 
A Footnote to History. 

And so, among Stevenson's first essays, written 
when he was a lad of twenty, loafing in Edin- 
burgh, you find a little piece called The Wreath of 
Immortelles, which is the performance of a hyper- 
sensitive youth who loves to dally with words, 
words, words. The boy is only learning to use 
his various equipment; he is endowed with senti- 
ment, insight, imagination, wit, humour, and a 
love for style as a thing of intrinsic value; but, 
he has laborious years to expend before he can 
exercise these gifts in harmonious combination. 
And so, some twelve or fourteen years later, you 
find the mature artist — who was far too intelli- 
gent a person not to appreciate the situation — 

^ R. L. S., Vailima Letters. 



THE MORALIST. 83 

you find the cunning workman preaching another 
sermon upon the same text, using his old, un- 
happy experience, and dexterously superadding a 
moral upon the purgative influence of the hand 
of time. 

The comparison of the two essays is instruc- 
tive : — 

. . . There is a certain frame of mind to which a 
cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. 
If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else. It 
was in obedience to this wise regulation that the other 
morning found me lighting my pipe at the entrance 
to old Greyfriars', thoroughly sick of the town, the 
country, and myself . . . Just then I saw two 
women coming down a path, one of them old, and 
the other younger, with a child in her arms. Both 
had faces eaten with famine and hardened with sin, 
and both had reached that stage of degradation, much 
lower in a woman than a man, when all care for dress 
is lost. As they came down they neared a grave, 
where some pious friend or relative had laid a wreath 
of immortelles, and put a bell glass over it, as is the 
custom ... I was struck a great way off with 
something religious in the attitude of these two un- 
kempt and haggard women ; and I drew near faster, 
but still cautiously, to hear what they were saying. 
Surely on them the spirit of death and decay had de- 
scended : I had no education to dread here : should 
I not have a chance of seeing nature ? Alas ! a pawn- 



84 R- L. STEVENSON. 

broker could not have been more practical and com- 
monplace, for this was what the kneeling woman said 
to the woman upright — this and nothing more : " Eh, 
what extravagance ! " O nineteenth century, wonder- 
ful art thou indeed — wonderful, but wearisome in thy 
stale and deadly uniformity ! ^ &c., &:c. 

Thus the youth, taking himself, apparently, 
with the most complete gravity. Now, listen to 
the man: — 

There, in the hot fits of youth, I came to be un- 
happy . . . But . . , even while I still con- 
tinued to be a haunter of the graveyard, I began 
insensibly to turn my attention to the grave-diggers, 
and was weaned out of myself to observe the conduct 
of visitors. This was dayspring, indeed, to a lad in 
such great darkness. Not that I began to see men, 
or to try to see them, from within, nor to learn charity 
and modesty and justice from the sight ; but still 
stared at them externally from the prison windows of 
my affectation. Once I remember to have observed 
two working women with a baby halting by a grave ; 
there was something monumental in the grouping, one 
upright carrying the child, the other with bowed face 
crouching by her side. A wreath of immortelles under 
a glass dome had thus attracted them; and, drawing 
near, I overheard their judgment on that wonder : 
" Eh, what extravagance ! " To a youth afflicted with 
the callosity of sentiment, this quaint and pregrunt 
saying appeared merely base . . 

^ R. L. S., Juvenilia. 



THE MORALIST. 85 

I would fain strike a note that should be more 
heroical ; but the ground of all youth's suffering, soli- 
tude, hysteria, and haunting of the graves, is nothing 
else than naked, ignorant selfishness. . . .^ 

The question inevitably arises. What per- 
centage of Caledonian students had Stevenson 
observed to frequent the nearest municipal 
cemetery? To hear this moralist, one would 
imagine a habit of graveyard soliloquy to be 
as common to youth as surreptitious smoking. 
And then, with one of those singular contra- 
dictions that surprise us at every turn in the 
works of Stevenson, we find this morbid dis- 
sertation to be but the prologue to a noble 
and manly passage, the funeral oration upon 
the author's departed friend. Here, as we 
read, we perceive another example of that 
gospel of courage which he was ever preaching. 

For, what are the Virginibus Puerisqne essays 
but so many gay calls to the slumbering courage 
eternal in the heart of man? The earlier chap- 
ters were written when the author was five-and- 
twenty ; the latter pieces, some three years later, 
at the same time as Will d" the Mill ; and I like 
to set the whole series beside that incomparable 
fable, and to take them together as the best of 
Stevenson. They are so kindly, humorous, and 

1 R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 



86 R. L. STEVENSON. 

fantastically jovial, it is odds but you shall rise 
from their perusal in quite a little glow of pleas- 
ure, and pleasure of a sparkling, crystal quality 
for which you may search the residue of Steven- 
sonian works — always excepting the Dedica- 
tions, and, perhaps, parts of the Inland Voyage 
and Travels with a Dotikey in the Cevetines — in 
vain. You shall receive other sensations in 
plenty; of pity, and terror, and admiration, 
and delight ; but never, I think, a sensation 
quite so purely pleasing.-^ 

It is true that the irresponsible essayist treats 
of the passion of love as one who has never 
apprehended the significance of that formidable 
expression ; " It is not at all within the province 
of a prose-essayist to give a picture of this hyper- 
bolical state of mind," he says, and perhaps he 
is right. Nevertheless, we will gladly go with 
him where he goes, music accompanying our 
steps, though the grassy road delicately skirts 
precipices, and airily bridges some ugly abysms. 
Or, as Stevenson puts it in his own charming 
manner, the reader's 

way takes him along a by-road, not much fre- 
quented, but very even and pleasant, which is called 

1 The temper and style and air of Virginibus Puerisque won 
the author from a friend the nickname of " Mr Fastidious Brisk," 
an apt piece of essential criticism in which (I am told) he rejoiced. 



THE MORALIST. 8/ 

Commonplace Lane, and leads to the Belvedere of 
Commonsense. Thence he shall command an agree- 
able, if no very noble prospect ; and while others 
behold the East and West, the Devil and the 
Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of 
morning hour upon all sublunary things, with an 
army of shadows running speedily and in many 
different directions into the great daylight of Eter- 
nity. The shadows and the generations, the shrill 
doctors and the plangent wars, go by into ultimate 
silence and emptiness ; but underneath all this, a 
man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much 
green and peaceful landscape ; many firelit parlours ; 
good people laughing, drinking, and making love as 
they did before the Flood or the French Revolu- 
tion ; and the old shepherd telling his tale under the 
hawthorn.^ 

We have come a long way from the boy and 
his sick musings in the sordid graveyard, you 
see; for "all clouds roll away at last, and the 
troubles of youth in particular are things but 
of a moment." ^ This young gentleman, enter- 
ing already upon one province of his many-citied 
kingdom, is discoursing of its polity to the grown 
men and women who live there; and though he 
pointedly deride them, this chief among special 
pleaders sets them all smiling; and some of 

* R. L. S., Virginilnis Puerisqiie. 
^ R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 



88 R. L. STEVENSON. 

them fall in love with him. For, as I have 
said, the words of Stevenson are informed with 
a fine resolve to make the best of things; — a 
spirit the more admirable when we call to 
mind (as I think we should) how the author 
was constantly liable to dangerous sickness, so 
that in his very boyhood we find him, as he 
tells us, "toiling (as I thought) under the very 
dart of death ;" ^ and how he was acquainted, 
even at twenty-five, with the deadly ills of total 
nerve-prostration. In the Virginibiis series, 
Ordered South is significantly set between the 
jovial Apology for Idlers and the brave Ais 
Triplex; and in Ordered South we have the 
artist, constant in extremity to the ruling 
passion, making a serene, picturesque, even 
comfortable, little work of art out of the very 
sensations that deprive him of sensation. 

The world is disenchanted for him. He seems to 
himself to touch things with muffled hands, and to see 
them through a veil. His life becomes a palsied 
fumbling after notes that are silent when he has found 
and struck them. He cannot recognise that this phleg- 
matic and unimpressionable body with which he now 
goes burthened is the same that he knew heretofore so 
quick and delicate and alive. ^ 

^ R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 
^ R. L. S., Virginibiis Puerisque. 



THE MORALIST. 89 

How many there must be in this generation 
who will recognise an eloquently just description 
of their own plight, at one time or another in their 
lives? And the essayist, who is an epicurean 
and also a moralist, goes on to draw his moral. 
After all, " the ' spirit of delight ' comes often 
on small wings " ; ^ and the sick man finds con- 
solation in the face of death, in the thought 
that the Hfe he loved will continue still, in joy 
and sorrow, when he is gone. It is true that 
the author, who, fortunately, did not die after 
all, added a note after some years (in a manner 
quite Ruskinian) to the effect that " a man who 
fancies himself a-dving will get cold comfort 
from the very youthful view expressed in this 
essay." ^ Never mind; the youth did his best 
with his view ; and we like him the better for 
his performance ; although I am not sure, if 
you "go to that" — I am not, I say, quite 
certain — that silence were not still the better 
part. 

Had Stevenson been untimely overtaken by 
death when he had written Virginibus Puerisqiie 
and Will o' the Mill ; and of all his works, had 
only these two gone down to posterity ; he would 
still have earned the reputation of a refined and 
admirable artist. The dual nature of man, one 

^ R. L. S., Virgiuibus Puerisqiie. 2 Jbid, 



90 R. L. STEVENSON. 

of those root-ideas which we find germinating 
in the minds of most great writers,^ and bring- 
ing forth all sorts of strange fruit, continually 
possessed the mind and inspired the imagination 
of Stevenson, " The clergyman, in his spare 
hours, may be winning battles, the farmer sailing 
ships, the banker reaping triumph in the arts; 
all leading another life, plying another trade from 
that they chose," ^ he says. The two lives are so 
inextricably interwoven that to discourse upon 
the one without touching the other is nearly im- 
possible; but I think that the little Virginibus 
cycle may be loosely described as Stevenson's 
idea of the conduct of that life which all must 
live, whether they will or no ; and that Will o' 
the Mill is the Stevensonian "pattern in the 
heavens " ; the story of a sojourn in the country 
of the ideal. But, as I say, the two ideas are 
necessarily so intermingled, lie so largely be- 
yond the province of language, and appear in 
each other's places with aspects so protean, 
that separate definition is impossible. I make 
but an approximate suggestion ; let us take the 
argument at that. 

1 As, for example, the idea of the man whose life is secretly 
spied upon by one who is unknown to him, or whom he believes to 
be dead, which haunted the mind of Dickens. Compare, notably, 
Our Mutual Friend, Martin Chuzzlewit, and Edwin Drood. 

^ R. L. S., Memories and Portraits, 



THE MORALIST. 9I 

I would not care to risk marring the perfect 
presentment of Wi// 0' tJie Mill by any clumsy 
analysis, or even by quotation. Have you read 
Will 6" the Mill? (if you have not, then — if 
you own a taste for such fare — there is a fine 
little repast laid for you). Then you will re- 
member how that Will was the very type of the 
perfect egoist; how, despite all his passionate 
aspirations, he never went down into the plain, 
but stayed in the mountains, beneath the pine- 
woods, beside the clear running water, like a 
miser hoarding his aspirations and magnificent 
illusions, and savouring the while his simple joys 
of life like an epicure ; how aspiration changes 
to ambition, and still he stays ; how the fat 
young man (whom I take to have been Mephisto 
upon a holiday) came and scattered those illu- 
sions in a breath, so that Will never afterwards 
dared put his fortune to the test; how he lost 
the chief good of life, and never knew it until 
too late; how, nevertheless, he continued to 
possess the good which he had chosen, and 
for which he had paid the price ; and how, at 
last, Death came to him as a friend. 

There is no moral to this fable, but the Celtic 
moral of fatalism : a fatalism which Stevenson 
sometimes tacitly disavows, and sometimes poig- 
nantly presents to you. And, when all is said, 



92 R. L. STEVENSON. 

we are as much concerned with the thrilling, 
vivid, picturesque presentment of the theme as 
with the theme itself. Style and treatment 
exactly accord with the subject; and the scenes, 
succeeding each other in a natural progression, 
remain like pictures in the memory. The mill 
beside the river in the mountain-pass; the clear 
running water, the waving pine-trees; the 
passage of the soldiers ; the vision of the valley 
in the setting sun; the coming of the fat young 
man; the figure of the parson's Marjory; above 
all, the night when Will o' the Mill goes at 
last upon his travels, which I venture to charac- 
terise as one of the finest pieces of pictorial 
narration in English literature ; and, again, the 
clear running water, the waving of the grave 
pine-woods, and, enfolding all like an atmos- 
phere, the pure serenity of the mountains : — who 
that has once read of them does not count 
these things among the treasures of his fairy 
city of remembrance? 

Disengaging the impression received from the 
beautiful accompanying images, we conceive of 
the central figure as of a strong man, statically 
strong like a tree, curiously studying himself, 
and profoundly entertained by the workings of 
that quick and intricate organisation; clinging, 
with invincible tenacity, to all that ministers 



THE MORALIST. 93 

to the pleasure of that divine constitution. He 
loves the dawn and sunrise, the communings 
of running water, the silent companionship of 
trees; the taste of these delights, he knows, 
leaves no regret. Let these, then, suffice. 

And in the amiable Dr Desprez, in The 
Treasure of Fraiichard, we find the same quali- 
ties. The Treasure of Franchard is a story only- 
tinctured with allegory; but in that tincture, 
as I have said, I think we may discern a paral- 
lel philosophy of the ideal, as it appealed to 
Stevenson : — 

The Doctor v/as a connoisseur of sunrises, and 
loved a good theatrical effect to usher in the day . . . 
The morning after he had been summoned to the 
dying mountebank, the Doctor visited the wharf at 
the tail of his garden, and had a long look at the 
running water. This he called prayer . . . After 
he had watched a mile or so of the clear water 
running by before his eyes, seen a fish or two 
come to the surface with a gleam of silver, and 
sufficiently admired the long shadows of the trees 
falling half across the river from the opposite bank, 
with patches of moving sunhght in between, he 
strolled once more up the garden and through his 
house into the street, feeling cool and renovated. 
. . . "Let me compose myself," he says, after an 
agitating interview . . . And so he dismissed his 
preoccupations by an effort of the will which he 



94 R. L, STEVENSON. 

had long practised, and let his soul roam abroad 
in the contemplation of the morning. He inhaled 
the air, tasting it critically as a connoisseur tastes a 
vintage, and prolonging the expiration with hygienic 
gusto. He counted the little flecks of cloud along 
the sky. He followed the movements of the birds 
round the church tower — making long sweeps, hang- 
ing poised, or turning airy somersaults in fancy, and 
beating the wind with imaginary pinions. And in this 
way he regained peace of mind and animal composure, 
conscious of his limbs, conscious of the sight of his 
eyes, conscious that the air had a cool taste, like a 
fruit, at the top of his throat. . . . 

The picture is graceful, playful, sympathetic, 
and — a little — inhuman. I cannot but think 
that the author had himself insistently present 
to himself when he penned that portrait. There 
is never any ambiguity about the work of 
Stevenson ; his pictures are so vivid, that when 
he paints from a mirror, we cannot but read 
the artist's own lineaments upon the canvas. 
And so, in the ideal philosopher, I seem to 
discover that singular lack — the want of some 
kindly, indefinable, human quality, which is apt 
to haunt the reader through his perusal of the 
works of Stevenson. 

The same suspicion of a certain something 
wanting is disengaged even from the jolly pages 
of the two little books of voyages and travels, 



THE MORALIST. 95 

An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey 
in the Cevennes. To say of a man that he is 
imperfect, may seem a trite observation; but, 
when such an one sets up to be a smiling philos- 
opher of catholic sympathies, he undertakes an 
enterprise which (according to evidence extant) 
does actually fall within the circle of human 
competence; and to detect an occasional blank 
in his purview is surely not unfair (though 
highly ungrateful) criticism. Moreover, in these 
journeyings the traveller went along with a 
ghostly companion, who once dwelt among men 
as the Reverend Laurence Sterne, That com- 
panion sharpens his pupil's vision in the day- 
time, and sits at his elbow the while he writes 
up his journal at night. Had the Reverend 
Laurence neglected to record the Sentimental 
Journey, it is odds that Stevenson would neither 
have gone a-cruising in the Arethusa, nor a-roving 
with Mademoiselle Modestine, goading her deli- 
cately with a pin. For these charming records 
and witty moralisations are the Sentimental Jour- 
ney, minus the soft Irish spirit of Sterne, plus 
the dour Scots temperament and a perception 
of the romance of landscape. This is no dis- 
praise ; for none of us exist save by virtue of 
ancestry. Only, when Robert Louis Stevenson 
went about with the Reverend Laurence Sterne, 



96 R. L. STEVENSON. 

the clergyman used, I think, to induce some- 
thing of a pose. Turn to the Epilogue to the 
Inland Voyage, written some ten years after the 
adventure, when Stevenson had rather discarded 
the Reverend Laurence, and you shall perceive, in 
that entertaining farce, a slight but characteristic 
difference from the earlier narrative. 

The next year after writing these gay philoso- 
phies of travel, and Will d the Mill, we find 
the author drafting an austere treatise on Morals 
— Lay Morals} if you please, in which one 
may recognise the groundwork of Pulvis et 
Umbra and A Christmas Serniojil^ which were 
published eight or nine years later. Of the 
Lay Morals, it may be enough to say that 
the preacher enunciates, with a fine pomp 
and eloquence of language, the sort of con- 
clusions which sensible persons at all times 
and in all places have come to of themselves, 
and which they are usually content to hold 
in unaggressive silence. But, to a Scot nurtured 
in a babel of theological controversy, something 
sickened, probably, with its tedious, inhuman 
clamour, and inheriting, moreover, the talent 
for metaphysic common to his race, some ex- 
pression of aggravated opinion may well have 
become a natural necessity. 

* R. L. ?i ., Juvenilia. ^ R. L. S., Later Essays, 



THE MORALIST. 97 

Pulvis et Umbra has been admiringly de- 
scribed as a "cosmic utterance"; and so, in 
so far as it treats of the Kosmos by name, it 
may be. The picture is only true, so far as we 
understand the truth, in a sense highly partial; 
the moral is picturesque, even noble. But from 
such a Kosmos may heaven preserve all good 
folk ! Here is the keynote to this astounding 
symphony : — 

. . . But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our 
senses give it us. We behold space sown with rotatory 
islands, suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of 
systems : some, like the sun, still blazing ; some rotting, 
like the earth ; others, like the moon, stable in deso- 
lation. All of these we take to be made of something 
we call matter : a thing which no analysis can help 
us to conceive ; to whose incredible properties no 
familiarity can reconcile our minds. This stuff, when 
not purified by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly 
into something we call life ; seized through all its 
atoms with a pediculous malady ; swelling in tumours 
that become independent, sometimes even (by an 
abhorrent prodigy) locomotory; one splitting into 
millions, millions cohering into one, as the malady 
proceeds through varying stages. This vital putres- 
cence of the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes 
us with occasional disgust, and the profusion of worms 
in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of a marsh dark- 
ened with insects, will sometimes check our breathing, 

7 



98 R. L. STEVENSON. 

SO that we aspire for cleaner places. But none is 
clean : the moving sand is infected with lice ; the 
pure spring, where it bursts out of the mountain, is 
a mere issue of worms ; even in the hard rock the 
crystal is forming . . . 

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease 
of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying 
drugged with slumber ; killing, feeding, growing, bring- 
ing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with 
hair like glass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter 
in his face ; a thing to set children screaming ; — and 
yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, 
how surprising are his attributes ! ^ 

Well — after all — things are not really like 
that. Here is a vision, monstrous, vivid, intol- 
erable, as though beheld in the refracted vision 
of fever. Jeremy Taylor might have written 
with an equal vigour and coloured magnifi- 
cence of manner; but Jeremy Taylor would 
have discoursed in another vein, because he 
was inspired with, what he would have de- 
signated, faith in God. Shakespeare might 
have written these passages better; but, when 
Shakespeare was in this sort of mood, he pre- 
ferred to write Hamlet. It may be, that the 
great and nameless fear which descends upon 
man when some unknown prop or stay is sud- 
denly withdrawn from his spirit, the panic 

1 R. L. S., Later Essays. 



THE MORALIST. 99 

terror which would now and again cast the 
vain and valiant George Borrow to the ground, 
and hold him with his face in the dust, has 
here assailed the bulwarks of Stevenson's private 
city of Zion. I do not know — perhaps the 
parallel is merely fanciful. In any case, Ptdvis 
et Umbra, this " cosmic utterance," is the ut- 
terance of a sick man in a strong access of 
personal emotion, curious of style, and invincibly 
moral, or rather Calvinistic, to the last extremity. 
Childe Roland to the dark tower comes. And 
in his strenuous moralisation of what is a pass- 
ing mood, it is the opulent style of the present- 
ment that is really admirable, and the moral 
that appeals to us is the implicit, unconscious 
moral of the author's courage in the face of 
these terrific phantasms : the same conscious 
yet unshaken courage which shines throughout 
his work. 

A Christinas Sermon, written when the author 
was about forty years old, is conceived in a 
different vein. Nimbly discoursing from his 
favourite rostrum, the pulpit, he eloquently for- 
mulates a series of witty and sensible criticisms 
upon the common way of life. It is " all werry 
nice " ; but, as I have said, the minority of 
people are content to hold these sentiments 
without indulging in didactic zeal, a zeal in- 



100 R. L. STEVENSON. 

herent in the Stevensonian constitution. And, 
in this case, the preacher had already said his 
say when he was still a youthful Ecclesiastes, 
discoursing in the essays Virginibus Puerisque. 
At the first, he steps aside from the moving 
crowd, and winds a melodious defiance upon 
his horn — a gallant defiance to pain, and 
failure, and death : — 

Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead 
wall — a mere bag's end, as the French say — or 
whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, 
where we wait our turn and prepare our faculties for 
some noble destiny ; whether we thunder in a pulpit, 
or pule in little atheistic poetry-books, about its vanity 
and brevity ; whether we look justly for years of health 
and vigour, or are about to mount into a bath-chair, as 
a step towards the hearse ; in each and all of these 
views and situations there is but one conclusion possi- 
ble : that a man should stop his ears against paralysing 
terror, and run the race that is set before him with 
a single mind.^ 

Thus Stevenson, at seven- or eight-and-twenty. 
Hear him also in middle age: — 

To look back upon the past year, and see how little 
we have striven, and to what small purpose j and how 
often we have been cowardly and hung back, or teme- 
rarious and rushed unwisely in ; and how every day 

•^ R. L. S., Virginibus Puerisqtie. 



THE MORALIST. lOI 

and all day long we have transgressed the law of kind- 
ness [here are the old accents of surpHce and bands, 
but there is no reason to suppose the preacher is not 
perfectly serious] : — it may seem a paradox, but in the 
bitterness of these discoveries a certain consolation 
resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's 
vanity . . . When the time comes that he should 
go, there need be few illusions left about himself. 
Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed 
much : — surely that may be his epitaph, of which he 
need not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at the 
summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field : 
defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius ! — 
but if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, 
undishonoured. The faith which sustained him in 
his lifelong blindness and lifelong disappointment will 
scarce even be required in this last formality of laying 
down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones ; 
there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the 
day and the dust and the ecstasy — there goes another 
Faithful Failure ! ^ 

It is well meant, it is bravely said ; and yet, 
is the conclusion entirely sound ? I hardly 
think that either the great Apostle or the august 
Emperor would be honestly gratified by the 
inscription upon their place of sepultur® of the 
epitaph made by Mr Stevenson, Anno Domini 
1890 or so. These men are among the mighty 

1 R. L. S., Later Essays. 



I02 R. L. STEVENSON. 

builders of the world ; their portion was not 
failure, but transcendent success; not defeat, 
but victory. But a half-truth balanced by its 
opposite moiety is robbed of half its glory ; and 
what becomes of the work of art under these 
circumstances? And the artist is bound to 
work within conditions imposed upon him from 
without. Moreover, Stevenson was far too acute 
a logician not to look, when it suited his pur- 
pose, upon both sides of the shield ; and in his 
Fables he gives both obverse and reverse. The 
Fables were written at intervals during the latter 
half of his career; and perhaps, of all the forms 
of literary art employed by Stevenson — and he 
used most of those extant at one time or another 
— that of the fable " set his genius" best. Here 
romance and metaphysic, character and wit, 
may meet together in harmony in the realm 
that is both homely and ideal; and the prob- 
lem of presentment offers valuable opportunities 
in the matter of prose composition. 

In The Yellow Paint, The House of Eld, and 
Faith, Half-Faith, and No Faith at all, is figured 
that nafve rebellion against stolid convention 
which characterises an age of transition. Gen- 
eration succeeds generation, the son follows in 
the sire's footsteps, until a line of cleavage 
starts into view, and a gulf widens ; and across 



THE MORALIST. IO3 

it young five-and-twenty, with scornful incom- 
prehension, beholds his father as though that 
respectable elder belonged to another planet. 
It is, in fact, the case of the new wine and 
the old bottles ; the parable whose musical 
phrases linger in the mind of childhood ; — the 
careless mind, which, at the same time, tacitly 
declines to remark any meaning in them. 

Voltaire (between whom and Stevenson an in- 
teresting parallel remains to be drawn by the 
curious) thought it eminently worth while to 
satirise the priestcraft of his day; and in The 
Yellow Paint Stevenson found consolation in 
directing a quaint and witty satire against a 
certain subtle doctrine of — what is known as — 
evangelicalism. Among the warring clans of sect 
and Church, this peaceful word is a slogan, or 
battle-cry, carrying such dire associations, and 
charged with meanings so esoteric, that I employ 
the expression with a becoming hesitation. I 
make no comment upon the merits of the quarrel 
in which Stevenson took sides so gaily. Al- 
though he loved preaching, he had small sym- 
pathy with the consecrated professors of that 
art. The Yellow Paint gives one aspect of the 
situation, The Hotise of Eld — an admirable 
and picturesque fable — gives the contrary view. 
The morals of both are quite inconclusive ; but 



I04 R- L. STEVENSON. 

here Stevenson is harping on his old theme — the 
unsatisfying nature of life. So in Faith, Half- 
Faith, and No Faith at all, where, in a wilder- 
ness of discords, there strikes the one chivalric 
note. 

In the ancient days there went three men upon 
pilgrimage : one was a priest, and one was a virtuous 
person, and the third was an old rover with his axe. 

The two first dispute upon the grounds of 
faith ; and as they go along, the adventures 
that befall them upset the priestly theories, to 
the satisfaction of the virtuous person. Mean- 
while, the old rover with the axe holds his 
peace; until — 

at last one came running, and told them all was lost : 
that the powers of darkness had besieged the Heavenly 
Mansions, that Odin was to die, and evil triumph. 

" I have been grossly deceived," cried the virtuous 
person, 

" All is lost now," said the priest. 

" I wonder if it is too late to make it up with the 
devil ? " said the virtuous person. 

"O, I hope not," said the priest. "And at any 
rate we can but try. — But what are you doing with 
your axe? " says he to the rover. 

" I am off to die with Odin," said the rover.* 

1 R. L. S., Fables. 



THE MORALIST. IO5 

And in Something in It, the best of the 
fables, Stevenson, who " was one like Glaucus 
that could change his shape, yet he could 
be always told," does the last justice to the 
evangelist. 

The missionary was naturally incredulous of 
the tales the natives told him of their religion. 
" ' There is nothing in it,' said the missionary." 
But one day he was rapt into the heathen 
place of the hereafter — the wrong heaven — and 
his views were suddenly enlarged. The story 
is perfectly told. And — 

The next moment the missionary came up in the 
midst of the sea, and there before him were the palm- 
trees of the island. He swam to the shore gladly, and 
landed. Much matter of thought was in that mis- 
sionary's mind. 

" I seem to have been misinformed upon some 
points," said he. " Perhaps there is not much in it, 
as I supposed ; but there is something in it after all. 
Let me be glad of that." 

And he rang the bell for service.^ 

Again, in a word, courage is the moral, 
though it be not always precisely the moral 
that Stevenson intended. So it is in Markheim, 
that singular and vivid study. " A high and 

1 R. L. S., Fables. 



I06 R. L. STEVENSON. 

simple courage shines through all his writ- 
ings," ^ says Mr Raleigh. Courage, though 

The sticks break, the stones crumble, 
The eternal altars tilt and tumble,^ 

— Courage qiiand meme. Here is the last word 
of Stevenson's philosophy: as, indeed, it has 
been that of how many millions of men and 
women besides, renowned or ingloriously ob- 
scure, who have lived and passed in silence. 
But Stevenson must find utterance, or he could 
not live. He was vocally inclined. Therein 
lies the difference. 

1 W. A. Raleigh, Robert Louis Stevenson. 

2 R. L. S., Fables. 



V. 

THE ARTIST. 

If to feel, in the ink of the slough, 

And the sink of the mire, 

Veins of glory and fire 

Run through and transpierce and transpire, 

And a secret purpose of glory in every part, 

And the answering glory of battle fill my heart ; 

To thrill with the joy of girded men 

To go on for ever and fail and go on again. 

And be mauled to the earth and arise, 

And contend for the shade of a word and a 

thing not seen with the eyes : 
With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at 

night 
That somehow the right is the right 
And the smooth shall bloom from the rough : 
Lord, if that were enough ? 

— R. L. S., Songs of Travel. 

When Stevenson flings his dainty glove in the 
iron face of destiny, mouths it in his private 
pulpit, or beguiles us by the wayside, we applaud 
and admire, and are entertained ; but when the 
artist discourses of his art, we are moved to lend 
a serious attention. " I never cared a cent for 



I08 R. L. STEVENSON. 

anything but art, and never shall," ^ says Loudon 
Dodd ; and no more, I think, did his maker. A 
man's theories are, ultimately, of value exactly 
in proportion as the man himself is an example 
of their efficacy. " In art you must give your 
skin ; " and Stevenson never grudged that 
sacrifice. Of his strictly technical disquisi- 
tions I shall have something to say in another 
place ; it is the Stevensonian code of ethics re- 
lating to the art of letters that I have here to 
consider. 

When he was thirty years old, and when he 
had already written essays, verses, treatises on 
morals, criticisms, voyages and travels, and 
stories, Stevenson promulgated his Morality of 
the Profession of Letters? Seven or eight years 
later, he wrote the Letter to a Young Gentleman 
who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art. In 
that interval, as will be seen, the author's 
principles seem in some degree to have suf- 
fered a change. We can but suppose that 
when the artist indited the Letter to a Young 
Gentleman, he wrote under the influence of a 
passing mood, which led him, in one passage, 
to a highly inconsistent piece of generalisation. 

The Morality of the Profession of Letter's is an 
excellent morality: going squarely into the ques- 

1 R. L. S., The Wrecker. 2 r. l. S., Later Essays. 



THE ARTIST. IO9 

tion, setting a high and reasonable ideal, fit 
both to inspire and chasten the aspirant. The 
preacher begins by unsparing denunciation of 
those who " adopt this way of life " (the craft 
of writing) "with an eye set singly on the liveli- 
hood." This attitude of mind, he says, must 
infallibly produce *' a slovenly, base, untrue, 
and empty literature " ; he proceeds eloquently 
to enforce the argument; and he goes on to 
specify the motives which alone should influence 
a young man to make his choice of a trade : — 

There are two just reasons for the choice of any way 
of life : the first is inbred taste in the chooser ; the 
second some high utility in the industry selected. 
Literature, like any other art, is singularly interesting 
to the artist ; and, in a degree peculiar to itself among 
the arts, it is useful to mankind ... So kindly is 
the world arranged, such great profit may arise from a 
small degree of human reliance on oneself, and such, 
in particular, is the happy star of this trade of writing, 
that it should combine pleasure and profit to both 
parties and be at once agreeable, like fiddling, and use- 
ful, like good preaching. This is to speak of Uterature 
at its highest ; and with the four great elders who are 
still spared to our respect and admiration, with Carlyle, 
Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson before us, it would 
be cowardly to consider it at first in any lesser aspect. 
But while we cannot follow these athletes, while we 
may none of us, perhaps, be very vigorous, very ori- 



no R. L. STEVENSON. 

ginal, or very wise, I still contend that, in the hum- 
blest sort of literary work, we have it in our power 
either to do great harm or great good ... So that 
the first duty of any man who is to write is intellect- 
ual. Designedly or not, he has so far set himself up 
for a leader of the minds of men ; and he must see 
that his own mind is kept supple, charitable, and 
bright. . . . To please is to serve ; and so far 
from its being difficult to instruct while you amuse, 
it is difficult to do the one thoroughly without the 
other . . . And so, if I were minded to welcome 
any great accession to our trade, it should not be 
from any reason of a higher wage, but because it 
was a trade which was useful in a very great and a 
very high degree. 

Here are sentiments which must find an ap- 
plauding echo in all honest and generous minds. 
In the second essay, written some years 
later, when the name of Robert Louis Steven- 
son had become famous, the essayist addresses 
an audience incomparably larger : here was an 
opportunity to strike another stroke which should 
go to the attainment of a certain recognised 
standard, or tradition, in letters; which tradi- 
tion, as it is his heritage, so it is the business 
of every honest man of letters to uphold and to 
confirm. He begins by drawing an analysis of 
the unstable mind of youth. He deals with the 
aspirant who stands at that painful juncture in 



THE ARTIST. Ill 

life when he must make his choice of a trade, 
with a sympathy both just and acute. Then, 
in admirable terms, he lays down the stern 
conditions under which the artist must exercise 
his art. And then, the consenting mind, fol- 
lowing the preceptor with eagerness, is suddenly 
brought to a stand. After formulating the 
questionable doctrine that the artist should 
" pay assiduous court to the bourgeois who 
carries the purse," our moralist goes on to carry 
the argument to its logical conclusion. These 
are points we need not discuss : the expression, 
whether of a passing mood, or of a piece of 
special pleadixig, needs no elaborate refutation. 
I prefer to remember that Stevenson the artist 
never quitted his task until the piece of work in 
hand was as near perfect as he could make it. 
Sick or well, travelling or sitting at home, though 
the inspiration tarried, though he must write 
and rewrite, and remodel from top to bottom, 
though he were deprived of speech and the power 
to hold his pen, and must dictate upon his 
fingers,^ the indomitable maker still toiled to 
attain perfection, until there was left no stroke 
untried, and the voice of inspiration had found 
complete utterance. 

From the Vailima Letters we may gain some 

1 R. L. S., Vailima Letters. 



112 R. L. STEVENSON. 

notion of the way in which he went about 
his work. 

Whatever the result, the mill has to be kept turning 
[he writes], . . . night or morning, I do my darndest,- 
and if I cannot charge for merit, I must e'en charge 
for toil, of which I have plenty, and plenty more ahead 
before this cup is drained ; sweat and hyssop are the 
ingredients. [And some three months later.] Since 
I last laid down my pen, I have written and rewritten 
The Beach of Falesd : something like sixty thousand 
words of sterling domestic fiction (the story, you will 
understand, is only half that length) ; and now I don't 
want to write any more again for ever, or feel so ; 
and I've got to overhaul it once again to my sorrow. 
I was all yesterday revising, and found a lot of slack- 
nesses. [And again.] I often work six and seven, 
and sometimes eight hours. [And when he has 
finished The Ebb-Tide.'] But O [he writes], it has 
been such a grind ! The devil himself would allow 
a man to brag a little after such a crucifixion ! And 
indeed I'm only bragging for a change before I 
return to the darned thing lying waiting for me on 
p. 88, where I last broke down. I break down at 
every sentence, I may observe ; and lie here and 
sweat, till I can get one sentence wrung out after 
another. 

A month later, and he has already made some 
way with A Family of Engineers. 

Since I wrote this last, I have written a whole 



THE ARTIST. II3 

chapter of my grandfather, and read it to-night; it 
was on the whole much appreciated, and I kind of 
hope it ain't bad myself. 'T is a third writing, but 
U wants a fourth. [And for a last extract.] I have 
been recasting the beginning of the Hanging Judge, 
or Weir of Hermiston ; then I have been cobbling 
on my grandfather, whose last chapter (there are only 
to be four) is in the form of pieces of paper, a huge 
welter of inconsequence, and that glimmer of faith 
(or hope) which one learns at this trade, that some- 
how and some time, by perpetual staring and glower- 
ing and rewriting, order will emerge. 

The practice is sound, you see, though the 
theory goes a little awry ; and whose theory does 
not? The son of the great engineers, the in- 
heritor of an austere tradition, is ready to toil 
with a single eye to the point of honour until 
there is no more virtue in him. 

For the artist [he writes in that same wonderful, 
inconsistent Letter to a Young Gentle?nan'] works 
entirely upon honour. The public knows little or 
nothing of those merits in the quest of which you 
are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. 
Merits of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the 
merit of a certain cheap accomplishment, which a man 
of the artistic temper easily acquires — these they can 
recognise, and these they value. But to those more 
exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish, which 
the artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, for 



114 R. L. STEVENSON. 

which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil 
" like a miner buried in a landslip," for which, day 
after day, he recasts and revises and rejects — the 
gross mass of the pubhc must be ever blind. To those 
lost pains, suppose you attain the highest pitch of merit, 
posterity may possibly do justice ; suppose, as is so 
probable, you fail by even a hair's-breadth of the high- 
est, rest certain they shall never be observed. Under 
the shadow of this cold thought, alone in his studio, the 
artist must preserve from day to day his constancy to 
the ideal.^ 

So Stevenson reads the Law ; and we know he 
fulfilled it to the letter. And so, in his example 
of unflinching industry, there lies the true moral 
for the aspirant. Here is the true lesson to the 
young gentleman who proposes to embrace the 
career of art. 

1 R. L. S., Later Essays. 



VI. 

THE ROMANTIC. 

. . . Romance, 
The Angel-Playmate, raining down 
His golden influences 
On all I saw, and all I dreamed and did, 
Walked with me arm and arm, 
Or left me, as one bediademed with straws 
And bits of glass, to gladden at my heart 
Who had the gift to seek and feel and find 
His fiery-hearted presence everywhere. 
— W. E. Henley, 
Arabian Nights'' Ente7-tninments. 

Stevenson was a born romantic. Romance, 
which is the common heritage of childhood, re- 
mained his possession to the end. With the 
most of us — 

Youth now flees on feathered foot. 
Faint and fainter sounds the flute, 
Rarer songs of gods ; . . .1 

and the years, steaHng on with muffled footsteps 
and blinding fingers, still conspire to veil from 
us the country of desire. But Stevenson never 

1 R. L. S., Underwoods. 



Il6 R, L. STEVENSON. 

crossed the marches of his own domain. To 
him, the inevitable change from youth to experi- 
ence carried with it no forgetfulness. The years 
brought gifts, but took httle away; the child 
never died, but lived on with the man; and 
Stevenson, at thirty-three or so, wrote the ro- 
mance of childhood InA Child's Garden of VerseSy 
begun while he was living in Bournemouth. 

Charles Dickens gave us the romance of 
childhood in prose, when he wrote the history 
of David Copperfield; and the book came with 
something of the force of a revelation upon a 
world of grown people who had fallen into the 
habit of shaping patterns of children all in the 
likeness of their own image. Dickens released 
the eternal child from this bondage of de- 
formity; and the enfranchised spirit lives, and 
sings, and plays with its fellows, in Stevenson's 
smiling verses. Read the Child's Garden to a 
child of a certain age, and ten to one he, or 
she, will lend a gratified attention. This, they 
are thinking, is the kind of talk they can 
understand. 

The rain is raining all around, 

It falls on field and tree, 
It rains on the umbrellas here. 

And on the ships at sea.^ 

1 R. L. S., A Child's Garden of Verses. 



THE ROMANTIC. II7 

I know not what indefinable picture is con- 
jured up in these simple words, of desolate 
country, shining street, and grey ships tossing 
on grey surges, but I know that such a vision 
lives in the mind of childhood, and that it is of 
stuff like this, of quaint, indefinite collocations 
and associations, that a great part of child- 
hood's happiness or unhappiness consists. Here 
is another infantine piece : — 

Of speckled eggs the birdie sings 

And nests among the trees ; 
The sailor sings of ropes and things 

In ships upon the seas. 

The children sing in far Japan, 

The children sing in Spain ; 
The organ with the organ-man 

Is singing in the rain.^ 

The child Robert Louis was acquainted with 
sickness ; and who that has been kept abed by 
reason of illness, or perhaps misdemeanour, but 
remembers the land of counterpane? It is not 
a bright province in the child-country; the 
sojourn there is nearly always compulsory, and 
requires, so to speak, more intellectual effort 
to get rid of a dull, even an intolerable, reality. 
Bed in the cold daylight, when all the coloured 

i R. L. S., A Child's Garden of Verses. 



Il8 R. L. STEVENSON. 

world is calling and calling — here is a thing to 
dash the stoutest courage ! 

And does it not seem hard to you, 
When all the sky is clear and blue, 
And I should like so much to play, 
To have to go to bed by day ? 

But he makes the best of it — 

And sometimes for an hour or so 
I watched my leaden soldiers go, 
With different unifoi'ms and drills, 
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills; 

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets 
All up and down among the sheets ; 
Or brought my trees and houses out, 
And planted cities all about. 

I was the giant great and still 
That sits upon the pillow-hill. 
And sees before him, dale and plain, 
The pleasant land of counterpane.^ 

And when he went to bed at night, torn — 
lamenting, reproved — from the jolly fireside, the 
light and warmth, and the strange and fascinat- 
ing conversation of elders, do we not remember 
how — 

All round the house is the jet-black night; 

It stares through the window-pane ; 
It crawls in the corners, hiding from the light, 

And it moves with the moving flame. 

^ R. L. S-, A Child's Garden of Verses. 



THE ROMANTIC. II9 

Now my little heart goes a-beating like a drum, 
With the breath of the Bogie in my hair; 

And all round the candle the crooked shadows come, 
And go marching along up the stair. 

The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp, 
The shadow of the child that goes to bed — 

All the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp, 
With the black night overhead. 

The treasures of that lost country of the 
primal years were esoterically precious ; and 
like the fairy gold, they are now all withered 
leaves. Now, we can look upon a whole arsenal 
of edge-tools without sensible emotion; but 
hark to the treble voice : — 

But of all of my treasures the last is the king, 
For there's very few children possess such a thing; 
And that is a chisel, both handle and blade, 
Which a man who was really a carpenter made. 

"A man who was really a carpenter" — there 
is all Eden in that simple utterance. Here is 
another treasure, which is buried with a singu- 
lar, characteristic impulse : — 

When the grass was closely mown. 
Walking on the lawn alone. 
In the turf a hole I found. 
And hid a soldier underground. 



120 R. L. STEVENSON. 

Under grass alone he lies, 
Looking up with leaden eyes, 
Scarlet coat and pointed gun, 
To the stars and to the sun. 

When the grass is ripe like grain, 
When the scythe is stoned again, 
When the lawn is shaven clear, 
Then my hole shall reappear. 

I shall find him, never fear, 
I shall find my grenadier; 
But, for all that's gone and come, 
I shall find my soldier dumb. 

He has lived, a little thing, 
In the grassy woods of spring; 
Done, if he could tell me true. 
Just as I should like to do. 

He has seen the starry hours 
And the springing of the flowers ; 
And the fairy things that pass 
In the forests of the grass. ^ 



Dreams and terrors, exquisite joys and rend- 
ing griefs, a darling hoard of treasures, passion- 
ate love and hate as passionate, and the whole 
world for a playhouse, — these are some of the 
elements which make the children's life. Of 
love and hate Stevenson relates but little ; of 
all else, he is eloquent; and here, for a last 

^ R. L. S., A Child's Garden of Verses. 



THE ROMANTIC. 121 

quotation, is a piece in the great green play- 
house: — 

Dear uncle Jim, this garden-ground, 
That now you smoke your pipe around. 
Has seen immortal actions done, 
And valiant battles lost and won. 



But yonder, see ! apart and high, 
Frozen Siberia lies ; where I, 
With Robert Bruce and WilHam Tell, 
Was bound by an enchanter's spell. 

There, then, a while in chains we lay, 
In wintry dungeons, far from day; 
But ris'n at length, with might and main. 
Our iron fetters burst in twain. 

A thousand miles we galloped fast, 
And down the witches' lane we passed. 
And rode amain, with brandished sword, 
Up to the middle, through the ford. 

Last we drew rein — a weary three — 
Upon the lawn, in time for tea, 
And from our steeds alighted down 
Before the gates of Babylon. ^ 

The verses are very pleasant, — although, as 
verses, they have no great merit. Indeed, the 
same remark applies more or less to all the 
verse of Stevenson: a good subject, a delight- 

1 R. L. S., A Child's Garden of Verses. 



122 R. L. STEVENSON. 

ful manner, but lacking, save in rare flashes here 
and there, the last indefinable touch which is 
poetry. Plangent and picturesque as the verse of 
Stevenson is, he seldom, I think, lights upon the 
" only words in the only order " ; and his finest 
and most romantic strains seem to bear the 
hammer-mark of the wielder of strong prose 
harmonies, rather than the serene touch of the 
born singer to the lute.^ Take, for instance, 
the magnificent stanza from Mater Triumphans ; 
which — to the ear of the present writer, at 
least — out of all the songs of Stevenson, rings 
strongest : — 

Infant bridegroom, uncrowned king, unanointed priest, 

Soldier, lover, explorer, I see you nuzzle the breast. 

You that grope in my bosom shall load the ladies with 

rings, 
You, that came forth through the doors, shall burst the 

doors of kings. 

It is gorgeous, but it is scarcely poetry — a dis- 
tinction that need be no dispraise. And how 
fine are the opening verses of the first stanza: — 

Son of my woman's body, you go, to the drum and fife. 
To taste the colour of love and the other side of life.'^ 

^ " A kind of prose Herrick divested of the gift of verse, and 
you behold the Bard." Thus Stevenson, talking, in a letter to 
a friend, of himself. 

2 R. L. S., Songs of Travel. 



THE ROMANTIC. 1 23 

The lines are surcharged with that indefinable 
quality we call romance, which makes the better 
half of life. Romance is indefinable ; it must be 
apprehended by the light of nature shining upon 
illustration, or not at all. Stevenson has come 
as near to definition as may be. 

The effect of night [he says], of any flowing water, 
of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the 
open ocean, calls up in the mind an army of anony- 
mous desires and pleasures ... To come at all 
at the nature of this quality of romance, we must bear 
in mind the peculiarity of our attitude to any art. No 
art produces illusion ; in the theatre we never forget 
that we are in the theatre ; and while we read a story, 
we sit wavering between two minds, now merely clap- 
ping our hands at the merit of the performance, now 
condescending to take an active part in fancy with the 
characters. This last is the triumph of romantic story- 
telling : when the reader consciously plays at being 
the hero, the scene is a good scene. 

It may be noted in passing how people who 
are apt to grumble at the featureless character 
of Scott's heroes or heroines, forget that the 
lack of personality in the chief persons of the 
story is a prime cause of the readers' enjoyment, 
since it enables them to " push the hero aside," 
and " consciously play at being the hero," plung- 
ing into the tale in their own persons. Stevenson 



124 ^- L. STEVENSON. 

himself could never suffer the colourless hero ; 
his Jim Hawkins comes the nearest to the con- 
vention; and our young friend Jim, though he 
was scarcely the hero of the tale, being much 
eclipsed by Silver the Magnificent, was still the 
ingenious narrator of the best story (qud story) 
Stevenson ever accomplished. As for his David 
Balfour, that dour, pragmatical, stubborn young 
man, he compels us, with my Lord Advocate 
Prestongrange, to " a respect mingled with 
awe." But this is by the way; let me not 
anticipate — ("I take that expression," says the 
immortal Doctor Marigold, " out of a lot of 
romances I bought. ... I never opened a 
single one of 'em — and I have opened many — 
but I found the romancer saying, ' Let me not 
anticipate': which being so, I wonder why he 
did anticipate, or who asked him to it ") — let 
us return, I say, to the consideration of Steven- 
son expounding his theory of Romance: — 

The threads of a story [he goes on] come from 
time to time together and make a picture in the web ; 
the characters fall from time to time into some atti- 
tude to each other or to nature, which stamps the 
story home like an illustration. Crusoe recoiling 
from the footprint, Achilles shouting over against 
the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian 
running with his fingers in his ears, — these are each 



THE ROMANTIC. I25 

culminating moments in the legend, and each has 
been printed on the mind's eye for ever . . . 
This, then, is the plastic part of literature : to em- 
body character, thought, or emotion in some act 
or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the 
mind's eye.-^ 

Here is a clear indication of part of the matter, 
in a form which made a particular appeal to 
him ; for the embodiment of " character, thought, 
or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be 
remarkably striking to the mind's eye," is the 
sovereign merit of Stevenson ; or, as he else- 
where expresses it, "Vital — that's what I am 
at, first : wholly vital, with a buoyancy of life. 
Then lyrical, if it may be, and picturesque, 
always with an epic value of scenes, so that the 
figures remain in the mind's eye for ever. "^ 

For a broader statement we must go to his 
essay upon Victor Hugo's Romances^: — 

The artistic result of a romance, what is left upon 
the memory by any really powerful and artistic novel, 
is something so complicated and refined that it is 
difficult to put a name upon it ; and yet something 
as simple as nature. 

1 R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 

' R. L. S., Vailinia Letters. 

8 R. L. S., Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 



126 R. L. STEVENSON. 

Take this with a passage of Mr Raleigh's: — 

But, for the most part, the romantic kernel of a story 
is neither pure picture nor pure allegory, it can neither 
be painted nor moralised. It makes its most irresist- 
ible appeal neither to the eye that searches for form 
and colour, nor to the reason that seeks for abstract 
truth, but to the blood, to all that dim instinct of 
danger, mystery, and sympathy in things that is man's 
oldest inheritance — to the superstitions of the heart.'' 

In these two passages abstract definition 
touches its limits : would we go further, we 
must embark in illustration. And here we 
may note that Stevenson's own romances hardly 
serve as illustrations of a single wide effect, 
united though various, easy to apprehend though 
impossible to define. It is difficult to regard 
any one of his long stories — with the single 
exception of Treasure Island — as a whole. Re- 
call a Stevenson; and instead of a complicated 
impression, compounded of an infinite variety 
of elements, there starts into the mind's eye a 
series of vivid episodes. 

But the "artistic result" of — let us say — a 
Dickens 2 is very different. The impression is 

^ W. A. Raleigh, Robert Louis Stevenson. 

2 A master for whom Stevenson owned a profound and lasting 
admiration — an admiration which drew him to read Pickwick 
once (at least) every year. See also his remarks on Martin 
Chiizzlewit in a recently published letter. 



THE ROMANTIC. 12/ 

multifarious as the remembrance of a year of 
crowded life, and yet one. For the great 
Charles conducts his stories as a general con- 
ducts a campaign: battalion after battalion 
is marshalled into position, and manoeuvres 
towards a common end ; regiments are de- 
tached upon particular duties, advance, and 
retire; now, the light falls upon a solitary figure 
plodding by night towards its appointed bourne; 
and again, the darkness lifts and discovers a 
whole army corps lying in position. And 
when the campaign is done, the whole country 
has been subdued, and the reader is conscious 
of a certain vicarious exaltation and triumph. 
So with Scott — so with Dumas, the master of 
narrative art. So, in a lesser sense, with 
Thackeray; for Thackeray cared not much for 
plot and counterplot, and the scheme of circum- 
stance: so long as his characters are alive and 
talking, he is content. Here is one reason why 
Stevenson must take his place below these 
masters. His field of operations is more nar- 
rowly circumscribed than theirs: it is as a 
master of romantic pictorial episode that we 
have first to consider him. 

But, the spirit of romance resides not only 
in the embodiment of "character, thought, or 
emotion in some act or attitude that shall be 



128 R. L. STEVENSON. 

remarkably striking to the mind's eye," but 
inspires and strikes through the most trivial 
incident — a momentary glance, an accidental 
word, a gleam of landscape. This ineluctable 
divinity will move in the very dust upon the 
street, peer from a beggar's rags, ride upon 
the wind, beckon from the fires of the dawn. 
It is not only when Lancelot of the Lake 
is ranging the lists, when Porthos dies amid 
whelming disaster, when the Black Knight 
thunders upon Front -de- Boeuf's castle doors, 
when Sydney Carton mounts the scaffold — 
not only when "Crusoe is recoiling from the 
footprint, Achilles shouting over against the 
Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow," — 
that the strong angel finds his avatar: but 
here, in the moonlit chamber opening upon 
the lagoons of old Venice, where Consuelo 
lived and sung; in the dark shop, buried deep 
in gloomy London, where Krook came by his 
hideous end, with none but Lady Jane to speed 
him ; in the summer evening when Eugene 
Wrayburn voyaged leisurely up river upon a 
lover's errand; in the city hospice, whither 
Colonel Newcome creeps home to die, — here, 
also, lives the spirit of romance. 

Born of that spirit, Stevenson was essentially 
and always a romantic; his very preaching is 



THE ROMANTIC. 1 29 

but the romance of ethics; and so his work 
is informed with romance to the smallest 
detail, the least word. Hence the extraordinary 
distinction of his work. It is never dull. You 
may read all his books from end to end, but 
you will light upon no dull passage. 

Romance, then, ranges from what has been 
called the Squalid-Picturesque to the highest 
regions of the ideal. Stevenson, beginning with 
romantic landscape, went on to the Squalid- 
Picturesque. When he was seven-and-twenty, 
living still in Edinburgh, he published A Lodging 
for the Night — an achievement savouring more of 
the study than of the open air, but none the less 
remarkable for that. Here are the same quality 
of vividness (what M. Marcel Schv^rob courage- 
ously calls romantic realism), and the same grim 
pleasure in the ugly, which are two of the 
marks of Stevenson. Thevenin Pensete, whose 
"bald head shone rosily in a garland of red 
curls " (" what right has a man to have red 
hair when he is dead ? " says Villon), and Villon 
searching the dead jade in the snow, are things 
which stick in the memory. 

In The Sire de MaUtroif s Door, another early 
story, there is the first fruit of that strange at- 
traction, or prepossession, of the Closed Door, 
which used to exercise the mind of Stevenson. 

9 



130 R. L. STEVENSON. 

One thing in life [he says] calls for another ; there 
is a fitness in events and places . . . Something, we 
feel, should happen ; we know not what, yet we pro- 
ceed in quest of it . . . Some places speak distinctly. 
Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder ; certain 
old houses demand to be haunted ; certain coasts are 
set apart for shipwreck.^ 

And we have M. Marcel Schwob ingeniously 
commenting thus : — 

Comme le fondeur de cire perdue coule le bronze 
autour du "noyau" d'argile, Stevenson coule son his- 
toire autour de I'image qu'il a cr^^e. La chose est 
tres visible dans The Sire de Maletroi^s Door. Le 
conte n'est qu'un essai d'explication de cette vision : 
une grosse porte de chene, qui semble encastrde dans 
le mur, cede au dos d'un homme qui s'y appuie, 
tourne silencieusement sur des gonds huil^s et 
I'enferme automatiquement dans des t^nebres in- 
connues.^ 

M. Schwob speaks in accents of unmistakable 
sympathy: he has tried the door business him- 
self, in Ics Portcs de r Opium, and a terrifying 
fantasy it is. A theory so ingenious is always 
worth stating; this one is very likely to be 
partly in accordance with the truth — but the 
truth itself we may not know. " C'est encore 

^ R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 

'^ Marcel Schwob, " R. L. S.," New Review, F'ebruary 1895. 



THE ROMANTIC. I31 

line porte qui hante d'abord 1' imagination de 
Stevenson au debut de DrJekyllandMrHyde" 
M. Schwob goes on to say. 

Terror waiting behind the Closed Door — that 
is the unseen image haunting the author's mind. 
As Drjekyll begins with the mystery behind the 
door opening upon the common street, "which 
was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, 
was blistered and distained," so it ends with 
the breaking down of the red baize door of the 
stricken doctor's cabinet, and the death of the 
Thing hiding behind that frail barrier. And 
terror lay waiting in ambush for Denis de Beau- 
lieu behind the Sire de Maletroit's door; but, for 
the damoiseau, there was provided a way of 
escape. The story is -d^ pastiche of the mediaeval ; 
as for the Sire de Maletroit himself, he is pure 
Gothic, one with grotesque, and gargoyle, and 
the pictures in the bestiaries. 

After Villon and the Sire de Maletroit comes 
Will o' the Mill, that "white-winged flight 
against the blue." The last scene, towards 
which the whole story is so artfully conducted, 
wherein all that has gone before chimes like an 
echo, thrills in the remembrance. The murky 
night air is crowded with the unseen dead, 
loaded with the perfume of heliotropes ; the 
corner of the blind in the lighted window is 



132 R. L. STEVENSON. 

lifted and let fall; the voice of the dead cries 
out of the dark, the mysterious equipage waits 
beside the gate . . . And it is not only the 
magnificent climax we remember, but the 
flowers with which the way leading to this 
wonderful scene is all bestrewn : — 

Some way up, a long grey village lay like a seam or 
a rag of vapour on a wooded hillside ; and when the 
wind was favourable the sound of the church bells 
would drop down, thin and silvery, to Will. . . 
The lilacs were already flowering, and the weather 
was so mild that the party took dinner under the 
trellis, with the noise of the river in their ears and the 
woods ringing about them with the songs of birds. 
. . . There was one corner of the road whence he 
could see the church-spire wedged into a crevice of 
the valley between sloping fir-woods, with a triangular 
snatch of plain by way of background. . . . 

There are not many romancers who border 
the road to fancy's bourne with pastures so en- 
ticing. And in the New Arabian Nights, not 
only the striking scenes, the main situations, 
thrill the curious reader — a lesser artist than 
Stevenson might have accomplished as much — 
but the very threads and colours in the pattern 
of the web are matter for delight. 

Who can forget the advent of the Young Man 
with the Cream-tarts, or the entrance of the 



THE ROMANTIC. 133 

President of the Suicide Club, or the sight of 
Mr Malthus turning up the ace of spades, or the 
apparition of Dr Noel in Mr Silas O. Scud- 
damore's bedchamber, or the spectacle of Mr 
Harry Hartley incontinently flinging himself 
and his bandbox over the wall, or the Dictator 
pouring the drug into the coffee under the green 
trees in his garden, or the mysterious coil of 
smoke continually vomited from the lone man- 
sion of the Destroying Angel, or the Fair Cuban 
watching Mr Caulder perish horribly in the 
swamp — who, I say, that has once beheld them, 
does not vividly recall these scenes and inci- 
dents ? These are the apotheoses of the story : 
they are all entirely romantic. And in each and 
all, it may be noted, there is something ugly, or 
sinister and daunting ; for Stevenson, whose fore- 
fathers dealt with strong sensations, inherited a 
tradition that conjured with strong elements. 
But besides these great moments, contributing 
to the sum of their effect, there remain soberer 
passages. 

Who was the "very tall black man, with a 
heavy stoop," who rises to warn the hesitating 
remnant of the guests at Mr Morris's memorable 
assembly.-* His action in the story is negative; 
he has only to appear on the stage for a moment, 
to utter a word, and to vanish with the crowd; 



134 R- L. STEVENSON. 

yet his apparition is so artfully figured that 
he awakes a sense of mystery, and the effect of 
the whole design is sensibly heightened, as by a 
patch of blackness. And in the little interlude 
when the Reverend Mr Rolles, with the Rajah's 
Diamond in his pocket, visits his club in search 
of counsel, how admirable is the introduction of 
the dens ex viachind : — 

At length, in the smoking-room, up many weary 
stairs, he hit upon a gentleman of somewhat portly 
build and dressed with conspicuous plainness. He 
was smoking a cigar and reading the Fortnightly Re- 
view ; his face was singularly free from all sign of pre- 
occupation or fatigue ; and there was something in 
his air which seemed to invite confidence and to ex- 
pect submission. The more the young clergyman 
scrutinised his features, the more he was convinced that 
he had fallen on one capable of giving pertinent advice. 

" Sir," said he, " you will excuse my abruptness ; 
but I judge you from your appearance to be pre- 
eminently a man of the world." 

" I have indeed considerable claims to that dis- 
tinction," replied the stranger, laying aside his maga- 
zine with a look of mingled amusement and surprise. 

" I, sir," continued the Curate, " am a recluse, a 
student, a creature of ink-bottles and patristic folios. 
A recent event has brought my folly vividly before my 
eyes, and I desire to instruct myself in life. By life," 
he added, " I do not mean Thackeray's novels ; but 



THE ROMANTIC. 135 

the crimes and secret possibilities of our society, and 
the principles of wise conduct among exceptional 
events. I am a patient reader; can the thing be 
learnt in books? " 

" You put me in a difficulty," said the stranger. " I 
confess I have no great notion of the use of books, 
except to amuse arailway journey ; although, I believe, 
there are some very exact treatises on astronomy, the 
use of the globes, agriculture, and the art of making 
paper-flowers. Upon the less apparent provinces of 
life I fear you will find nothing truthful. Yet stay," 
he added, " have you read Gaboriau ? " 

Mr Rolles's definition of life is instructive: 
there are many authors who, starting from the 
same theorem, will gail}'- improvise at large, 
under the impression that to improvise is to 
produce literature. Sir Walter Scott, they read, 
wrote his books before breakfast, and had 
little care to revise his manuscript. Steven- 
son — it is upon record — did not improvise ; 
he toiled with an indefatigable industry; and 
so it is that even his minor passages are 
wrought with remarkable excellence. He had 
great endowments; but the faculty of quick 
and sufficient invention seems to have been 
denied him. Consider what he accomplished 
despite all disability: and the record remains 
both for a lesson and an encouragement. 

The pose and manner assumed by the narra- 



136 R. L. STEVENSON. 

tor of the New Arabian Nights escape analysis in 
their subtlety. The historian is fooling, fooling 
excellent well ; he knows it, he knows you know 
it, but his sedate demeanour never for an instant 
relaxes. The manner is doubtless reminiscent 
of Galland; nevertheless, to transliterate the 
Frenchman thus is a feat of singular dexterity. 
" He was in dress, for he had entertained the 
notion of visiting a theatre," says the historian, 
relating the adventure of Lieutenant Bracken- 
bury Rich. The little pompous touch, the sug- 
gestion of formality, in that simple statement, 
convey the whole attitude, — an attitude which 
exactly fits the occasion, and whose fitness 
adds another pleasure to the narrative. But a 
pose, after all, is but a trick of legerdemain, 
an exercise which is often the resource of 
the young man, training himself in the use of 
another's weapons while his own equipment is 
forging. Stevenson, who was born with a talent 
for letters as well as a gift of romance, was a 
proficient in such gymnastic: it is even a ques- 
tion if the man of letters did not sometimes 
handicap, as well as help, the romancer. 

To pass from the earlier, bookish stories and 
The New Arabian Nights, to the short stories and 
longer romances which he continued to bring 
forth until the last day of his life, is to find the 



THE ROMANTIC. 137 

same assured, successful handling of the episode, 
with the same opulence of detail. Thrawn Janet, 
and Black Andie's tale of Tod Lapraik in Cat- 
riona, although they pale somewhat in lustre 
beside the master-achievement of its kind, 
Wandering Willie s Tale in Redgaimtlet, are ex- 
cellent witch-stories both. The earlier of the 
two, Thrawn Janet, which was written before 
Treasure Island (from whose publication, when 
he was thirty-two, dates the popular fame of 
Stevenson), is the better of the two; although 
the effect is confused by the introduction of 
the Black Man. Such a story must be either 
frankly supernatural or materially intelligible. 
Stevenson leaves us in doubt as to whether the 
Black Man were a real black man or Sathanas 
in person ; but if the Black Man who gave the 
Reverend Mr Soul is such an ugly fright were 
nothing but a wandering irresponsible nigger 
(as the author seems to imply), the whole struc- 
ture of the narrative is shaken. But the at- 
mosphere and presentment of both stories are 
completely effective. There is another black 
man in The Merry Men, which was written about 
the same time as Thrawn Janet, who, again, has 
nothing to do with the story which the author 
had, apparently, set out to tell, but who suddenly 
rises out of the sea and finishes the anecdote in 



138 R. L. STEVENSON. 

his own way. Stevenson seems to have been 
spell-bound for a time by a diabolical suggestion 
to introduce a black into his stories. But, 
again, in The Merry Men, the atmosphere is per- 
fectly rendered, the presentment eloquent and 
vivid. 

The sun, which had been up some time, was already 
hot upon the neck ; the air was listless and thundery, 
although purely clear ; away over the north-west, where 
the isles lie thickliest congregated, some half a dozen 
small and ragged clouds hung together in a covey; 
and the head of Ben Kyaw wore, not merely a few 
streamers, but a solid hood of vapour. There was 
a threat in the weather ... As I walked upon the 
edge I could see far and wide over the sandy bottom 
of the bay ; the sun shone clear and green and steady 
in the deeps ; the bay seemed rather like a great 
transparent crystal, as one sees them in a lapidary's 
shop ; there was naught to show that it was water but 
an internal trembling, a hovering within of sunglints 
and netted shadows, and now and then a faint lap and 
a dying bubble round the edge. 

The storm which is to bring about the catas- 
trophe is approaching; there is the menace of 
tempest in the aspect of sea and sky and air; 
and when that impression is rendered, there 
remains the indefinable presentiment of dis- 
aster, which must be directly expressed in so 
many words — " there was a threat in the 



THE ROMANTIC. 1 39 

weather " — and the effect is complete. There 
is another impression of imminent storm, of a 
different effect, in the tremendous episode to- 
wards the end of David Coppcrfield. The com- 
parison of the two descriptions is curious. 

*' Don't you think that," I asked the coachman, in 
the first stage out of London, " a very remarkable sky ? 
I don't remember to have seen one like it." 

"Nor I — not equal to it," he replied. "That's 
wind, sir. There'll be mischief done at sea, I ex- 
pect, before long." 

It was a murky confusion — here and there blotted 
with a colour like the colour of the smoke from damp 
fuel — of flying clouds tossed up into most remarkable 
heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than 
there were depths below them to the bottom of the 
deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild 
moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread 
disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her 
way and were frightened. There had been a wind 
all day ; and it was rising then, with an extraordinary 
great sound. 

It is hardly fair to compare the respective 
merits of the two storm-pieces. Stevenson's 
was but a summer gale, sufficient to serve his 
purpose; while Dickens's memorable tempest 
was of a sort which befalls but once in fifty 
years or so, and which came as the part 
culmination of a great and lengthy work in- 



140 R. L. STEVENSON. 

volving multifarious issues. But, after due 
allowance is made for these distinctions, it is 
instructive to set Stevenson's whole account of 
the storm beside his elder's. 

Treasure Island, which followed next in point 
of time after The Merry Men, was the first long 
story written by Stevenson. It was also, strictly 
speaking, the last, with the doubtful exception 
of The Wrecker. For, in Treasiire Island mcidtnt 
and character and setting are subordinated to 
the business in hand, and the tale is rounded 
to completion, with a success that he did not 
afterwards attain. Kidnapped is an excellent 
story of adventure, but the plot is of slight con- 
struction that imposes very lax restrictions, so 
that it cannot fairly enter into comparison with 
Treasure Island. But for the little business of 
Uncle Ebenezer and the stolen inheritance, the 
tale would be pure picaresque, the persons of 
the story wandering in and out at will, the 
interest depending more upon character than 
brute incident. As it is, Alan Breck Stewart 
is the central figure, and they are his sayings 
and deeds of arms that go to make the chief 
interest: moreover, the tale breaks off, leaving 
more than one issue undecided ; and the sequel, 
Catriona, is really made up of two short stories, 
the first concerning the Appin murder, the second, 



THE ROMANTIC. I4I 

the wooing of Catriona Drummond. The Black 
Arrow, again, is but a series of gallant episodes, 
strung together by the frailest thread of intrigue. 
Prince Otto stands in a different category. Orig- 
inally designed as a play, a play it remains, set 
with palatial and landscape scenery of a romantic 
magnificence, — a magnificence so alluring that 
the attention is continually and forcibly diverted 
from the action. And The Wrong Box, which is 
a farce, also stands outside the question. TJie 
Master of Ballantrae is another example of the 
long story irremediably resolving itself into dis- 
tinct episodes. In The Wrecker the real story 
does not begin until the one hundred and sixty- 
seventh page; and the tale goes all the way 
heavily overloaded with incidental episode. The 
form of the narrative, as the authors inform us 
in the Epilogue, was something of an experi- 
ment ; and, as an experiment, it may without 
presumption be described as a gallant failure. 
That brings us to the end of the books which 
make pretensions to the novel rank. In all, 
there are character, incident, and setting finely 
and episodically pictured ; in all, save in Treas- 
ure Island, there is the singular impotence of 
the central idea to control and subordinate the 
whole; and in all, nevertheless, every phrase, 
even every word, of this astonishing artist is 



142 R. L. STEVENSON, 

worth reading for its own sake. Open a 
novel of Stevenson's at random, or recall its 
perusal, and beautiful or striking passages will 
isolate themselves naturally from the context. 
And many of such passages are like the sub- 
limation of a dream. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is 
a dream-fantasy from beginning to end. The 
extraordinary vividness of the presentment sug- 
gests the heightening touch of fever. Who but 
an inveterate dreamer could have imagined Dr 
Jekyll's horrible, involuntary transition .-' 

I sat in the sun on a bench [says Dr Jekyll], the 
animal within me licking the chops of memory; the 
spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent 
penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After all, 
I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I 
smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing 
my active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their 
neglect. And at the very moment of that vainglorious 
thought a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and 
the most deadly shuddering. These passed away, 
and left me faint ; and then, as in its turn the faint- 
ness subsided, I began to be aware of a change 
in the temper of my thoughts, a greater boldness, 
a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of 
obligation. I looked down ; my clothes hung form- 
lessly on my shrunken limbs ; the hand that lay on 
my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more 
Edward Hyde. 



THE ROMANTIC. 1 43 

The apparition of David Pew in Treasure Island, 
the tap-tapping of the blind pirate's stick,i 
is like a horror of sleep. Olalla is all a 
dream; indeed, in his Chapter on Dreams,"^ 
the author has told us that the sudden 
frenzy of the Senorita was revealed to him 
in a dream. The entrance to Markheim of 
Mephistopheles (in Markheim), and the mur- 
derer's terror, belong to the shadowy land whose 
king is Unreason : — 

Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his 
eyes. Perhaps there was a film upon his sight, but 
the outlines of the new-comer seemed to change and 
waver like those of the idols in the wavering candle- 
light of the shop ; and at times he thought he knew 
him ; and at times he thought he bore a likeness 
to himself; and always, like a lump of living terror, 
there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing 
was not of the earth and not of God. 

The curious intrusion into The Misadventures 
of John Nicholson of the murder in the house 
at Murrayfield is another case in point: the 

1 Commenting upon Stevenson's weird and daunting treatment 
of blindness as a property of fiction, in the figure of Pew, and 
that other sinister figure of the blind catechist, in Kidnapped, we 
may recall an extraordinary story of Sheridan Lefanu's, The 
Mystery of Wyvern Chase, and Dickens's blind man, Stagg, in 
Barftaby Rudge. 

2 R. L. S., Mefnories and Portraits. 



144 R- L. STEVENSON. 

body lying in the shuttered dining-room is 
quite out of place in a farce. Indeed, the 
utilisation of the poor dead shell of humanity 
as a property of farce must always inflict an 
outrage upon the feelings. This is the fatal 
objection to TJie Wro7ig Box: the mind be- 
grudges consent to expedients so wanton. Even 
in The Arabian Nights Entertainments — those of 
Scheherezade, not those of Stevenson — the 
Hunchback was not really dead — there is noth- 
ing wrong with him but a misplaced fish-bone; 
and he comes to life again and lives happily 
ever afterwards. 

The element of dream-fantasy lends an extra- 
ordinary potency to the work of Stevenson; 
but, like an enchanter's gift, the spell is only 
efficacious upon somewhat cruel conditions. 
For such fantasy as his demands a partial sus- 
pension of the sober reason for its operation; 
and hence it is that the work of Stevenson 
is not always wholly sane. To say so is only 
to mark a quality, for — 

... I have seen the good ship sail 

Keel upward, and mast downward, in the heavens, 

And solid turrets topsy-turvy in air- 

And here is truth; . . . 

The goddess of Literature is divine in this, 
that she welcomes to her table guests of 



THE ROMANTIC. 145 

every degree, so they come decently apparelled. 
And Stevenson spared no expense in the equip- 
ment of his following. The most of his company 
are men of their hands, skilled in arms, subtle 
in strategy, adventurers all; of lovers, as of 
ladies, there are few. Of the two eternal 
factors in the destiny of man, warfare and 
love, he chiefly dealt with the first. Man's 
duel with fortune, rather than the duel of 
sex, was what interested him at first ; and 
so the critics used to complain that Stevenson 
knew nothing of love, and was unacquainted 
with the nature of woman. And in TJie Master 
of Ballajitrae it cannot be denied that Mrs Henry 
Durie is little more than a lost opportunity. No 
intelligent woman could have occupied Mrs 
Durie's position for a single day without, if 
not commanding, at least potently influencing, 
the situation. And The Wrecker deals entirely 
with the affairs of men, with the insidious and 
virulent wars of commerce : unless you make 
an exception of Mamie, who was quite common- 
place, and a trifle shrewish into the bargain. 

But, in Prince Otto we find the Prince unmis- 
takably in love with his wife; if Madame von 
Rosen be no woman, but a figment in lace 
petticoats and black silk stockings, the male 
novelist may relinquish his pen, for the fields 



146 R. L. STEVENSON. 

of this life are no longer a place for his exer- 
cises; and as for Amalia Seraphina, Princess 
Cinderella, — while we may leave the Prince to 
give her his heart, we cannot but yield her 
admiration. And in Catriona Mr David Balfour 
is very much in love, in his dour Scots way; 
and Miss Barbara Grant loves Mr Balfour; 
even Catriona, simple as she is, perceives 
this clearly; and Catriona herself, although 
(I own) I do not entirely believe in her, is a 
pleasant young lady enough. Dick Naseby, in 
The Sto7y of a Lie, is a young man hard hit, 
if ever a young man was ; and he deserved a 
better fate than Esther Van Tromp prepared 
him. Read the chapter called TJie Prodigal 
Father goes 071 from Strength to Strength, and — 
though it scarce comes up to the splendour of 
its title — you shall find a true picture of a certain 
phase of passion. Read The Great N'orth Road, 
that alluring fragment, and consider Nance 
Holdaway and Mr Archer: the romance of her 
life is beginning for Nance — alas ! we know not 
how it ended. Read TJie Yojtng Chevalier, 
another fragment of promise, and remark the 
presentment of the wine-seller's wife. There are 
few more romantic passages in Stevenson : — 

They called the wine-seller Paradou. He was built 
more like a bullock than a man, huge in bone and 



THE ROMANTIC. 1 47 

brawn, high in colour, and with a hand like a baby for 
size. Marie-Madeleine was the name of his wife ; she 
was of Marseilles, a city of entrancing women, nor was 
any fairer than herself. She was tall, being almost of 
a height with Paradou ; full-girdled, point-device in 
every form, with an exquisite delicacy in the face ; her 
nose and nostrils a delight to look at from the fineness 
of the sculpture, her eyes inclined a hair's-breadth 
inward, her colour between dark and fair, and laid on 
even like a flower's. A faint rose dwelt in it, as though 
she had been found unawares bathing, and had blushed 
from head to foot. She was of a grave countenance, 
rarely smiling ; yet it seemed to be written upon every 
part of her that she rejoiced in life. Her husband 
loved the heels of her feet and the knuckles of her 
fingers ; he loved her like a glutton and a brute ; his 
love hung about her like an atmosphere : one that 
came by chance into the wine-shop was aware of that 
passion ; and it might be said that by the strength of 
it the woman had been drugged or spell-bound. She 
knew not if she loved or loathed him ; he was always 
in her eyes like something monstrous, — monstrous in 
his love, monstrous in his person, horrific but imposing 
in his violence ; and her sentiment swung back and 
forward from desire to sickness. But the mean, 
where it dwelt chiefly, was an apathetic fascination, 
partly of horror ; as of Europa in mid-ocean with her 
bull.i 

And, for a last consideration, there remains 

^ R. L. S., The Young Chevalier. 



148 R. L. STEVENSON. 

the unfinished Weir of Hermiston, upon which 
the author was at work when death took him. 
The story itself, as it stands, is but the first 
sketch in the clay; with that we need have 
no concern; had the author lived to complete 
his work, no doubt the effect — whatever it was 
— would have been marred by no inconsist- 
ency. As it stands, in the chapter A Leaf from 
Christina s Psalm-book, he has achieved a little 
masterpiece of romance. In that scene of lovers' 
meeting, wrought with a beauty and delicacy 
that, did we seek comparisons, would compel 
us to recall the name of the artist who told 
of the meeting of Richard Feveril and Lucy 
beside the river, Stevenson touched perfection. 

... In the last weeks of his life [Mr Colvin tells us] 
he attacked the task [ IVeir of Hermistori] again, in a 
sudden heat of inspiration, and worked at it ardently 
and without interruption until the end came. No 
wonder if during these weeks he was sometimes aware 
of a tension of the spirit difficult to sustain. " How 
can I keep this pitch?" he is reported to have said 
after finishing one of the chapters ; and all the world 
knows how that frail organism, overtaxed so long, in 
fact betrayed him in mid-effort. 

So Stevenson's courage carried him to the 
end; and he fell, like his elders, Dickens and 
Thackeray, leaving a task unaccomplished. 



VII. 



THE NOVELIST. 

He was a type-hunter among mankind. He despised small 
game and insignificant personalities, whether in the shape of 
dukes or bagmen, letting them go by like sea-weed; but show 
him a refined or powerful face, let him hear a plangent or a pene- 
trating voice, fish for him with a living look in some one's eye, 
a passionate gesture, a meaning or ambiguous smile, and his mind 
was instantaneously awakened. — R. L. S., The Story of a Lie. 

Romance (as Mr Raleigh has pointed out) ^ is an 
attribute of man's nature — a passion, whose im- 
perious desires may be denied or indulged, but 
whose nature suffers no observable process of 
evolution. But the gift of apprehending charac- 
ter, like an ear for music, requires an assiduous 
cultivation; the constant elements which make 
up the human constitution, with their innumer- 
able combinations, with the continual modifica- 
tions wrought upon them by time and chance 
and circumstance, must be observed with an 

1 W. A. Raleigh, Robert Louis Stevenson, 



150 R. L. STEVENSON. 

unwearying vigilance, and learned by heart like 
a lesson. Charles Dickens was possessed by 
"inimitable" genius; but there resides a dif- 
ference, by the whole width of heaven, between 
the characterisation of Nicholas Nickleby and the 
portraiture in — let us say — Our Mutual Friend ox 
Edwin Drood. And in the difference between 
Stevenson's earlier character studies and the 
transfigured portraiture of TJie New Arabian 
Nights, and his three desperadoes of TJie 
Ebb-Tide and the living men and women of 
Weir of Hermistou, there is implied half a life- 
time of laborious study. He began with such 
sentimental adumbrations as Ati old Scots Gar- 
dener, diXiA John Todd the Shepherd ;^ and it is 
already a long step forward when he recre- 
ates Master Francis Villon in A Lodging for 
the Night. That sinister figure grew directly 
out of his historical studies; so did Tabary, 
Thevenin Pensete, Dom Nicholas, Montigny, 
the Seigneur de Brisetout, Denis de Beaulieu, 
and the Sieur de Maletroit; and, considering 
that the author's fancy was nourished only upon 
the arid figments of printed records, the force of 
the presentment is remarkable. Figures of his- 
torical romance like these exist upon a conven- 
tion of their own; they have but to take their 

1 R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 



THE NOVELIST. I5I 

place in the intrigue of the piece, and to perform 
certain definite actions or feats of valour, or to 
embody certain definite sentiments; and, so they 
be suitably equipped with the necessary qualities 
— so they are brave or cowardly, subtle, witty, 
or amorous, as the case require — we ask no 
more. It is in the extraordinary magnificence 
of endowment with which he gifts his creations, 
combined with his unrivalled mastery of the 
"enchanting art of narrative," that makes the 
giant strength of Alexander Dumas. It is 
the same spirit which inspires the mediseval 
romances of Sir Walter Scott ; whereas, in the 
romances of that maker which deal with a 
nearer generation, the element of idiosyncrasy — 
a thing inconsistent with pure romance — begins 
to count as a factor in the general effect. And 
the same spirit, pushed to extreme issues, in- 
spired Victor Hugo, the hunch-backed, essen- 
tially histrionic descendant of Sir Walter. For 
the well-heads of this spring we may trace 
backward to the miracle-plays and the Morte 
DartJuir ; and the curious may follow the clue 
until it lead thern deep into the classic groves 
of antiquity. 

If we except the youthful sketches, the heroes 
of philosophical allegory, and the characters in 
Providence and the Guitar — a story built upon 



152 R. L. STEVENSON. 

an experience of the author's recounted in 
Ajt Inland Voyage — the elder figures in Steven- 
son's gallery, the vagabonds and soldiers in A 
Lodging for the Night and The Sieiir dc Mal^troif s 
Door, and the fantastic company of the New 
Arabian Nights, fall into the category of a par- 
ticular convention. But in The Story of a Lie, 
written when the author was twenty-nine, we 
are suddenly brought face to face with a study 
from the life. The story is not a particularly 
good story, as Stevensonian stories go; but 
Dick Naseby is a real young man, despite his 
slight Meredithian flavour; and the Admiral is 
a real, red-nosed, and entirely worthless old 
scamp. Stevenson ever loved the Squalid- 
Picturesque; and although Dick and Esther are 
the chief persons of the story, it is the Admiral 
who figures most conspicuously, and they are 
the Prodigal Father's red nose and ineffectual 
colour-box which linger in the memory. And 
in The Pavilion on the Links (which was written 
during Stevenson's first sojourn in America, 
after his Amateur Emigrant experiences, and 
which follows TJie Story of a Lie in point of 
time) it is neither Northmour's wild moods nor 
Clara's beauty that is the dominant impression, 
but the character and person of the absconding 
banker, Bernard Huddlestone: — 



THE NOVELIST. 1 53 

He had a long and sallow countenance, surrounded 
by a long red beard and side-whiskers. His broken 
nose and high cheek-bones gave him somewhat the air 
of a Kalmuck, and his light eyes shone with the excite- 
ment of a high fever. He wore a skull-cap of black 
silk ; a huge Bible lay open before him on the bed, 
with a pair of gold spectacles in the place, and a pile 
of other books lay on a stand by his side. The green 
curtains lent a cadaverous shade to his cheek ; and, as 
he sat propped on pillows, his great stature was pain- 
fully hunched, and his head protruded till it overhung 
his knees. 

There is the portrait; and the character of a 
proper scoundrel is depicted in colours so for- 
cible that, in spite of the fine romantic setting, 
the repulsive figure of Bernard Huddlestone 
comes near to usurping the whole picture. 

About this time were written the studies of 
Thoreau and Samuel Pepys, studies of a shrewd 
and delicate discrimination. There was some- 
thing of the transcendental Thoreau, something 
of Pepys the indefatigable hedonist, in Steven- 
son; and so in these essays we have, not two 
men of parts but, three talented personages 
analysed with eloquence and insight. 

And then, when Stevenson was thirty, came 
Treasure Island, which marked a tide in his 
affairs which — in a word — led on to fortune. To 
name Treasure Island is to recall John Silver, 



154 R- L- STEVENSON. 

that little masterpiece of characterisation. It is 
much to the praise of the artist's powers of 
restraint that he was able to keep this opulent 
personality within the bounds of the story, and 
so preserve an unity of effect. He did accomplish 
this feat; and John Silver, in his measure, is to 
Treasure Island what Chicot the Jester is to the 
Valois cycle of romances, and especially to les 
Quarante-cmq in that cycle. Both heroes play 
their part to perfection ; and, in both cases, their 
part is generously conceived, so that character 
and opportunity rise and fall in striking and 
harmonious combination. The delineation of 
Cap'n Silver marks the point of Stevenson's 
attainment to a high degree of proficiency in 
his art. After much bookish study of human 
life as refracted through the temperaments of 
other men, he has come to consider life with 
his own eyes; and the formidable apparition 
of the seafaring man with one leg stands 
(balancing on his crutch) at the head of a con- 
siderable society, which lives and moves amid 
a landscape of singular beauty, a province re- 
conquered in the many-citied land of the 
unseen. 

Treasure Island depends not at all for its 
interest upon the novelty of the theme. The 
theme is the old, stock theme of pirates and 



THE NOVELIST. 155 

buried treasure. It is the personality of the 
pirates and the way they set about their 
business which (as in life) fascinate the reader. 
In such a story, were the element of character 
reduced to a set of monotoned abstract qualities, 
the story might still remain an excellent story. 
There is little enough individuality of character 
in Poe's sombre invention of The Gold Bug; yet 
the story is a model of its kind. And it is upon 
record that the readers of Young Folks' Paper, 
for whose delectation Treasure Island was serially 
published, cared little for Silver and his crew. 
"Character to the boy," says Stevenson, talking 
of Treasure Island, " is a sealed book " — a state- 
ment which contains a half-truth. But, character 
to the grown person is at least as interesting 
as the romance of circumstance; or, to put the 
matter another way, a person who does not care 
for the one will probably relish the other. And 
Stevenson brought down both kinds of bird in 
Treasure Island. 

In The Black Arrow, which followed Treasure 
Island, the characterisation is necessarily more 
conventional. For one thing, the period of 
which the story treats is highly remote; and for 
another, the author was bent only upon amusing 
boys and girls ; whereas, in Treasure Island, he 
was singly occupied in amusing himself. And 



156 R. L. STEVENSON. 

yet, this mediaeval rout of nobles, priests, men- 
at-arms, and outlaws is marshalled before us 
(in a lingo artfully contrived out of TJie Paston 
Letters) with some of the lineaments and the 
accents of life;^ and the author, profoundly in- 
terested in character as he is, cannot withhold 
his hand from adding little traits of idiosyncrasy. 

"An ye prepare so carefully," said Dick [he is alone 
with Lawless in the outlaw's cave], " I have here some 
papers that, for mine own sake, and the interest of those 
that trusted me, were better left behind than found 
upon my body. Where shall I conceal them. Will? " 

"Nay," replied Lawless, "1 will go forth into the 
wood and whistle me three verses of a song ; mean- 
while do you bury them where you please, and smooth 
the sand upon the place." 

" Never ! " cried Richard. " I trust you, man. I 
were base indeed if I not trusted you." 

" Brother, y'are but a child," replied the old outlaw, 
pausing and turning his face upon Dick from the thresh- 
old of the den. "I am a kind old Christian, and no 
traitor to men's blood, and no sparer of mine own in a 
friend's jeopardy. But, fool child, I am a thief by 
trade and birth and habit. If my bottle were empty 
and my mouth dry, I would rob you, dear child, as 
sure as I love, honour, and admire your parts and per- 
son ! Can it be clearer spoken? No."^ 

1 Stevenson himself considered Richard Crookback to be 
"really a very spirited puppet." 

2 R. L. S., The Black Arrow. 



THE NOVELIST. I 57 

Between the first series of The New Arabian 
Nights, written when the author was twenty- 
eight, and the second series, elapsed an interval 
of six years; in that interval were written — The 
Story of a Lie, TJirawn Janet, The Merry Men, 
Treasure Island, The Treasure of Frajichard, The 
Black Arrow, Prince Otto, and the excellent 
fragment, never completed, of The Great North 
Road. Of these. The Story of a Lie, Treasure 
Isla7id, Prince Otto, and The Great North Road, 
were largely built upon motives of character or 
passion. And in the second series of The New 
Arabian Nights, though there be something lack- 
ing of the gaiety and freshness of the earlier 
entertainments, there is an irresistible element 
of individuality. We are conscious that the 
persons of the story are flesh and blood; and, 
whereas the misadventures of Francis Q. Scud- 
damore or the Reverend Mr Rolles excite sym- 
pathy no more than do the mock disasters 
which befall Harlequin or Pantaloon, when we 
read of the degrading plight of Mr Edward 
Challoner, the devotion of Harry Desborough, 
the fallen fortunes of Mr Theophilus Godall, 
even the ghastly situation of the explosive gen- 
tleman with the chin-beard, we are afflicted with 
something like commiseration ; and they are the 
artistic experiments in house agency of Mr Paul 



158 R. L. STEVENSON. 

Somerset — incidents arising directly from that 
gentleman's peculiar tastes and character — that 
remain in the memory, rather than the cataclys- 
mic inventions of Zero. And, while my Lady 
Vandeieur, Madame Zephyrine, and the Dicta- 
tor's daughter pass with a flutter of perfumed 
skirts and are gone, the fair Cuban and the 
Honourable Mrs Luxmore are ladies to be seri- 
ously reckoned with. And the final chapter of 
TJie Dynamiters is neither more nor less than 
a scene in a comedy of manners. 

It is this lively faculty of individual creation, 
or, if you prefer it, of expert delineation — 'tis 
all one — that gives to Stevenson's work a great 
part of its interest ; and yet, the same faculty is 
constantly bringing him into difficulties. The 
Wrecker, for instance, with its great assemblage 
of diverse characters, its admirable sketches of 
student-life in Paris, drawn from Stevenson's 
experiences in his youth — its "mingling of races 
and classes in the dollar-hunt, the fiery and not 
quite unromantic struggle for existence, with its 
changing trades and scenery, and two types in 
particular, that of the American handy-man of 
business and that of the Yankee merchant 
sailor " — with all this TJie Wrecker might have 
been an admirable novel of character and man- 
ners, just as it might have been an admirable 



THE NOVELIST. 1 59 

Story of adventure. But, as it stands, that long 
bustling narrative, stuffed full of clever work, 
fails of its effect as a whole. There is a deal 
about the students in Paris — and not a word of 
it has anything to do with the main intrigue: 
the whole troupe is presently hurried from the 
stage, and we hear no more of it ; there is a vast 
amount of the San Francisco business, which 
only touches upon the story at one or two 
isolated points; and the central interest of the 
book does not open until Norris Carthew begins 
to spin his yarn at the end of the second 
volume. In a word, the book is a short story, 
with the material for three or four novels 
of manners thrown in. Remark the figures of 
Loudon Dodd (degraded creature though he be), 
Jim Pinkerton, Nares, Hemstead, Tommy Had- 
den, and the three skippers, Bostock, Wicks, 
and Trent ; and observe the whole crowd of 
subsidiary characters, all drawn to the life. 
The conventional prototypes of many estimable 
acquaintances in fiction are known to all the 
world; but Stevenson's people, in common with 
the delineations of but two or three contem- 
porary writers, step into the book in their habit 
as they live. And once there, they often prefer 
to exist by and for themselves, rather than be- 
come the mere vehicles of a story. 



l60 R. L. STEVENSON. 

Prince Otto (begun as Semiramis : a Tragedy^ 
when the author was in his teens, taken up 
again when he was twenty-nine, rewritten five or 
six times, and finished several years afterwards), 
again, which might have become a play, or a 
story of adventure in Seaboard Bohemia, or a 
love-story, is all these things in part, and none 
of them altogether. We are led at first to 
expect a romantically ingenious plot; still upon 
the trail of intrigue, we begin to think the book 
is really drama after all, the characters are so 
insistently individual; then we return to the 
story — and by that time the book is near its 
end; and, despite the wonderful chapter of the 
flight of the Princess, we turn the last page with 
a feeling not far from disappointment. We 
had been led to expect so much, you see. And, 
amid all that brilliant company, the sardonic 
figure of Sir John Crabtree is most clearly 
defined, although he plays but a subordinate 
part in the main design. 

But when the reader comes to the last sen- 
tence in TJie Great NortJi Road, begun by Steven- 
son while he was living at Bournemouth, when 
he had finished Prince Otto, he is conscious of a 
different feeling — he is painfully desirous to 
know the end of this seductive fragment. For, 
here is the beginning of a love-story indeed, 



THE NOVELIST. l6l 

not to mention the highwayman business ; and 
Nance Holdaway is a real woman, sincerely 
entertaining sentiments, new to her experi- 
ence, towards the mysterious and attractive 
Mr Archer. 

Mr Archer, disclaiming any thought of flattery, 
turned off to other subjects, and held her all through 
the wood in conversation, addressing her with an air 
of perfect sincerity, and Hstening to her answers with 
every mark of interest. Had open flattery continued, 
Nance would have soon found refuge in good sense ; 
but the more subtle lure she could not suspect, much 
less avoid. It was the first time she had ever taken 
part in a conversation illuminated by any ideas. All 
was then true that she had heard and dreamed of 
gentlemen ; they were a race apart, like deities know- 
ing good and evil. And then there burst upon her 
soul a divine thought, hope's glorious sunrise : since 
she could understand, since it seemed that she too, 
even she, could interest this sorrowful Apollo, might 
she not learn? or was she not learning? Would not 
her soul awake and put forth wings? Was she not, 
in fact, an enchanted princess, waiting but a touch to 
become royal? She saw herself transformed, radiantly 
attired, but in the most exquisite taste : her face grown 
longer and more refined ; her tint etherealised ; and 
she heard herself with delighted wonder talking like 
a book.^ 

1 R. L. S., The Great North Road. 
II 



1 62 R. L. STEVENSON. 

We perceive there was much laid in store for 
poor Nance that never came to pass, since her 
creator neglected to fulfil her destinies; for, in 
the capital opening of TJie Great North Road^ 
there are evident indications of the sort of plot, 
more or less intricate, which attracts the reader's 
attention from the outset with an element of 
mystery — a method which Stevenson usually 
rejected. Nance Holdaway is so well drawn, 
that, had all her story been related, it is likely 
she would have taken her place with the rest 
of those men and women, the leaders of the 
Stevensonian society, who stand forth from 
among their fellows, and in whose conversation 
we forget the business upon which they are 
ostensibly engaged. 

As Francis Villon, in A Lodging for the Night, 
the Admiral, in The Story of a Lie, Bernard Rud- 
diest one, in The Pavilion on the Links, John 
Silver, in Treasure Island, Sir John Crabtree, in 
Prince Otto, Jim Pinkerton and Captain Nares, 
in The Wrecker, do stand forth and clamantly 
engross attention : so David Balfour, the dour 
Scot who falls into dire misfortune, and then in 
love, and who took both adventures very hardly ; 
Alan Breck Stewart, the "bonny fighter" and 
constant comrade; Mr Utterson, that inesti- 
mable lawyer; Michael Finsbury, the lawyer of 



THE NOVELIST. 1 63 

a type extremely different ; James Durie, Master 
of Ballantrae; Huish, the vile cockney; Wilt- 
shire, the South Sea trader; Hermiston, the 
Hanging Judge, Kirstie, his servant, and Chris- 
tina, beloved of his son: disengage themselves 
from the rest of the Stevensonian romance and 
farce, from the ranks of their inferiors and the 
coil of circumstance, and dwell in knowledge like 
people with whom we have kept house. 

And all the men, save two or three, have this 
in common: their characters own something 
sinister, and often repellent. Delight in the 
Squalid-Picturesque drew Stevenson in his youth 
to limn the dead rascal, Villon; in maturer age 
he gropes in a city sewer, and gives us Huish; 
and Huish — his dialect apart — is a masterpiece 
of portraiture. The rest of his men are mainly 
adventurers, or grave personages dealing with 
large affairs ; for, as I have said, Stevenson liked 
better to paint the duel of fortune than the duel 
of sex ; and it is perhaps inevitable that one 
side of life, presented so entirely to the exclu- 
sion of the other, should take on a rougher, more 
harsh, more sanguinary aspect than it wears 
in nature. In The Ebb-Tide, written at Apia 
in the last years of his lifetime, the experi- 
enced artist seems to have become conscious of 
this; and, although Huish is a thing to spit 



1 64 R. L. STEVENSON. 

upon, the captain, with his searing memory of 
his child — "Adar, only daughter of Captain 
John Davis and Mariar his wife, aged five" — 
and Herrick, writing to his sweetheart, establish 
a sense of kinship that makes an invaluable relief 
in the whole effect of that brilliant design. 

Stevenson's deliberate omission of ''the other 
side of life," of the element of feminine char- 
acter, in the most of his books, is the more re- 
markable when we consider the women whom 
he did create. There is Barbara Grant, who 
coquetted with the stockish David with an ele- 
gance and skill that deserved a better success; 
there is Catriona Drummond, though she, it is 
true, is little more than a piece of petticoated 
innocence with a pair of grey eyes; and then, 
there are Christina Elliott and her aunt Kirstie 
in Weir of Henniston. To peruse A Leaf from 
Christina s Psalm-book from beginning to end, 
and At the Weaver's Stone (the last chapter, 
broken midway, that Stevenson ever wrote), is to 
rise up inspired with a deep delight in the pre- 
sentment of scenes conceived in the high vein 
of romance. Stevenson divined the inmost, 
wordless thoughts of Christina's heart, when she 
went to her chamber to change her stockings 
to the pink. He read her soul like an open 
page, as she sat and waited for Archie Weir to 



THE NOVELIST. 165 

come to her at the Weaver's Stone. And in 
Kirstie Elliott, he began a monumental figure, 
eloquent of tragedy, a type of inexpugnable 
sorrow. Peculiar treasure passing unclaimed 
and unregarded, secret riches wasting all unused 

— here is a common fate, a destiny more cruel 
than Desdemona's; and such a fate was Kirstie 
Elliott's. 

There is no more gay and airy trifling, no 
more excellent fooling — no more reckless farce 

— in The Ebb- Tide and Weir of Heriniston ; the 
novelist is in earnest, he is giving all he has; 
and when it comes to this point with him Chris- 
tina, and the Hanging Judge, and Kirstie Elliott 
rise into being; and in them is their creator's 
memory honoured. 

And besides these, what a gallant, motley 
regiment wears the badge of Stevenson ! Princes 
and cabmen, murderers and ministers of state, 
buccaneers and princesses, beggarmen and 
millionaires, witches and clergymen, Yankee 
sharpers and Poor Jack, Highlander, Lowlander, 
and Cockney, pass in a vivid procession, with 
passionate gesture and silent, eloquent speech, 
into the city of their ultimate habitation, founded 
in the land of dreams. 



VIII. 

THE LIMNER OF LANDSCAPE. 

Nature then . . . 
To me was all in all — I cannot paint 
What then I was. The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock, 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
Their colours and their forms, were then to me 
An appetite; . . . 

Wordsworth. 

To the youthful Stevenson, intensely preoccu- 
pied with the desire to write, to make something 
in words ("that was a proficiency that tempted 
me; and I practised to acquire it, as men learn 
to whittle, in a wager with myself" ^), the study 
of landscape offered, not only a vehicle of deli- 
cate and pleasurable sensations but, a ready and 
congenial choice of subjects. 

With Wordsworth and the poets of his time [says 
Mr. J. A. Symonds, propounding a neat theory in his 

1 R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 



THE LIMNER OF LANDSCAPE. 1 6/ 

essay on Landscape],^ nature owns something corres- 
pondent to man's consciousness. A positive myth- 
ology, importing the imagination into science — if I 
may so express this revolution in thought about the 
universe — replaces the anthropomorphism of the 
Greeks, and fills at last the vacuum created by medi- 
aeval theology. 

To attempt to show in what the inheritance 
bequeathed by Wordsworth and his successors 
consisted, would carry me far beyond my scope. 
Such as it was, Stevenson entered into his heri- 
tage; and what chiefly concerns us is his use of 
that appreciation of landscape for its own sake, 
which makes an integral part of modern art. 
He studied letters together with landscape, and 
he sees with the refracted vision of other seers as 
well as with his own eyes. Not his the elemen- 
tal, savage delight in nature of Richard Jeffreys, 
"the Leatherstocking of literature," nor the 
austere, philosophical regard of Thoreau and 
his fellow-gymnosophists. Rather was his 
passion for nature's beauty sensuous in kind; 
and like many another young man, even the 
Prophet of the Lakes himself, it seems that he 
entered to his proper field of minute and patient 
study, the study of mankind, through the tre- 
mendous portals of the mountain and the sun- 

1 John Addington Symonds, Essays Speculative and Suggestive, 



1 68 R. L. STEVENSON. 

rise. But, when the inevitable change had 
passed, and the dainty landscape-limner had 
flourished and blossomed into the creator and 
romantic whom we know, he still clung to his 
first love ; and the great effects of changing sky 
and deep forest, smiling champaign, rolling hills, 
and beating seas, which once wholly engaged 
the artist, serve now as the magnificent back- 
grounds to his designs. 

So, in the beginning, we find an eager, thread- 
paper, sensitive youth wandering the fields, with 
— as he says — " always two books in my pocket, 
one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my 
mind was busy fitting what I saw with appro- 
priate words ; when I sat by the roadside, I 
would either read, or a pencil and a penny 
version-book would be in my hand, to note 
down the features of the scene or commemorate 
some halting stanzas. " ^ 

Here are his notes of one such scene, An 
Autumn Effect, from an essay published in The 
Portfolio in 1875, when the author was twenty- 
five: — 

A pall of grey cloud covered the sky, and its colour 
reacted on the colour of the landscape. Near at 
hand, indeed, the hedgerow trees were still fairly green, 
shot through with bright autumnal yellows, bright as 

1 R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 



THE LIMNER OF LANDSCAPE. 1 69 

sunshine. But a little way off, the solid bricks of 
woodland that lay squarely on slope and hill- top were 
not green, but russet and grey, and ever less russet 
and more grey as they drew off into the distance. As 
they drew off into the distance, also, the woods seemed 
to mass themselves together, and lay thin and straight, 
like clouds, upon the limit of one's view . . . The 
sun came out before I had been long on my way; 
and as I had got by that time to the top of the ascent, 
and was now treading a labyrinth of confined by-roads, 
my whole view brightened considerably in colour, for 
it was the distance only that was grey and cold, and 
the distance I could see no longer. Overhead there 
was a wonderful carolling of larks which seemed to 
follow me as I went ... A few hundred yards 
farther, and, passing through a gap in the hedge, I 
began to go down hill through a pretty extensive tract 
of young beeches. I was soon in shadow myself, but 
the afternoon sun still coloured the upmost boughs 
of the wood, and made a fire over my head in the 
autumnal foliage . . . There was something about 
the atmosphere that brought all sights and sounds 
home to one with a singular purity, so that I felt as if 
my senses had been washed with water.-"^ 

This epicurean young gentleman — "artist and 
colourman in words " — is enjoying himself ex- 
tremely, you see; and it is a question which 
affords him the greater pleasure, the contem- 

1 R. L. ?)., Juvenilia. 



170 R. L. STEVENSON. 

plation of these manifold, serene beauties, or the 
setting them in precious words. But, there is 
another side to the picture. The epicure whose 
"senses had been washed with water" — a deft 
phrase — presently wakes up to a different sen- 
sation, which is recorded with the sort of quaint 
solemnity that makes part of the perennial 
charm of youth. 

(^Added the next mornhig.) He who indulges habit- 
ually in the intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for 
the very reason that he reaps a greater pleasure than 
others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a more 
intolerable and utter prostration. It is quite possible, 
and even comparatively easy, so to enfold oneself in 
pleasant fancies that the realities of life may seem but 
as the white snow-shower in the street, that only gives 
a relish to the swept hearth and lively fire within. By 
such means I have forgotten hunger, I have sometimes 
eased pain, and I have invariably changed into the 
most pleasant hours of the day those very vacant and 
idle seasons which would otherwise have hung most 
heavily upon my hand . . . Do not suppose that 
I am exaggerating when I talk about all pleasures 
seeming stale. To me, at least, the edge of almost 
everything is put on by imagination ; and even nature, 
in these days when the fancy is drugged and useless, 
wants half the charm it has in better moments. I can 
no longer see satyrs in the thicket, or picture a high- 
wayman riding down the lane. The fiat of indiffer- 



THE LIMNER OF LANDSCAPE. 171 

ence has gone forth : I am vacant, unprofitable : a 
leaf on a river with no volition and no aim : a mental 
drunkard the morning after an intellectual debauch. 
Yes, I have a more subtle opium in my own mind 
than any apothecary's drug ; but it has a sting of its 
own, and leaves me as flat and helpless as does the 
other.^ 

But these are only the pains of a beginner; 
the faculty whose exercise seems to entail such 
penalties is presently to become the absorbing 
preoccupation of existence: meanwhile, we may 
observe the author consoling himself thereby, 
as he puts his little record of emotions into 
nice English. 

And meanwhile, Stevenson follows the Scots 
tradition, and goes to France, and lives in the 
forest of Fontainebleau with the painters, and 
develops theories upon style. Here, from his 
writings at five- or six-and-twenty, is a pic- 
ture, entirely French in effect, and rather like 
Millet: — 

Perhaps the reader knows already the aspect of the 
great levels of the Gatinais, where they border with 
the wooded hills of Fontainebleau. Here and there a 
few grey rocks creep out of the forest as if to sun 
themselves. Here and there a few apple-trees stand 
together on a knoll. The quaint, undignified tartan 
^ R. L. S., Juvenilia. 



172 R. L. STEVENSON. 

of a myriad small fields dies out into the distance ; 
the strips blend and disappear; and the dead flat 
lies forth open and empty, with no accident save 
perhaps a thin line of trees or faint church-spire 
against the sky. Solemn and vast at all times, in 
spite of pettiness in the near details, the impression 
becomes more solemn and vast towards evening. 
The sun goes down, a swollen orange, as it were 
into the sea. A blue-clad peasant rides home, with 
a harrow smoking behind him among the dry clods. 
Another still works with his wife in their little strip. 
An immense shadow fills the plain ; these people 
stand in it up to their shoulders ; and their heads, as 
they stoop over their work and rise again, are relieved 
from time to time against the golden sky.^ 

That is well written; so far as landscape may 
be rendered in prose, that scene of the sun- 
setting upon the flat, cultivated champaign is 
rendered. And, throughout the Inland Voyage, 
and the travels in the Cevennes which followed 
his French experiences, the landscape is presented 
in a series of alluring vignettes. By this time 
Stevenson is master of his trade so far as expres- 
sion goes; he wields the English tongue with 
a fastidious and delighted mastery. Wherever 
he goes, in all quarters of the world, he paints 
these word-pictures for our delectation. Here 
is one observed in America from the windows 

^ R. L. ^., Juvenilia. 



THE LIMNER OF LANDSCAPE. 1 73 

of the emigrant train, when, in 1879 (^^ twenty- 
nine), he is playing the amateur emigrant: — 

The train was then, in its patient way, standing 
halted in a by-track. It was a clear, moonlit night ; 
but the valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine 
direct, and only a diffused glimmer whitened the tall 
rocks and relieved the blackness of the pines. A 
hoarse clamour filled the air ; it was the continuous 
plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among 
the mountains. The air struck chill, but tasted good 
and vigorous in the nostrils — a fine, dry, old mountain 
atmosphere . . . When I awoke next morning, 
I was puzzled for a while to know if it were day or 
night, for the illumination was unusual. I sat up at 
last, and found we were grading slowly downward 
through a long snowshed ; and suddenly we shot into 
an open ; and before we were swallowed into the next 
length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse of a huge 
pine-forested ravine upon my left, a foaming river, and 
a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.-' 

And here, from the same continent, is a mar- 
vellous night-piece, written a year or so later: — 

The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless, 
changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent's back. 
The stars, by innumerable millions, stuck boldly forth 
like lamps. The milky way was bright, like a moonht 
cloud ; half heaven seemed milky way. The greater 

^ R. L. S., The Amateur Emigrant. 



174 R- L. STEVENSON. 

luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter's 
moon. Their light was dyed in every sort of colour — 
red, like fire ; blue, like steel ; green, like the tracks 
of sunset ; and so sharply did each stand forth in its 
own lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, 
star-spangled arch we know so well in pictures, but 
all the hollow of heaven was one chaos of contesting 
luminaries — a hurly-burly of stars. Against this the 
hills and rugged tree-tops stood out redly dark. 

You will not often match that for a piece of 
pictorial prose. And we read of no inglorious 
collapse next morning ! The habit of imaginative 
observation has become a part of the artist, like 
his appetite; and it is upon the exercise of the 
one, as much as the other, that he continues to 
exist. 

And in all the novels and stories of Stevenson 
the landscape co-exists and counts in the story 
with the characters ; and sometimes, as in Prince 
Otto, the men and women are apt to look a trifle 
insignificant beside the gorgeous spectacle of the 
natural earth. It is possible to make the best 
of stories without a particle of landscape, save 
the merest stage-properties, as in Fielding and 
Thackeray; or you may, if you choose, include 
as factors in your design the aspect and opera- 
tions of the visible universe, as in Scott, or 
Hugo, or Dickens. But Stevenson would prob- 



THE LIMNER OF LANDSCAPE. 1 75 

ably have found it very difficult to work upon 
the former method, save in the construction of 
plays; and when he was employed upon that 
business, he collaborated with Mr Henley. So, 
in all his novels, we have romantic settings and 
beautiful, sunbright (to use an epithet dear to 
him) vignettes. Take, for instance, the sea-piece 
from TJie Pavilion on the Links, written during 
his American sojourn : — 

The pavilion stood on an even space ; a little behind 
it, the wood began in a hedge of elders huddled to- 
gether by the wind ; in front a few tumbled sand-hills 
stood between it and the sea . . . The district 
was alive with rabbits, and haunted by gulls which 
made a continual piping about the pavilion. On 
summer days the outlook was bright, and even glad- 
some ; but at sundown in September, with a high 
wind, and a heavy surf rolling in close along the 
links, the place told of nothing but dead mariners 
and sea disaster. A ship beating to windward on the 
horizon, and a huge truncheon of wreck half-buried 
in the sands at my feet, completed the innuendo of the 
scene,^ 

Note that neither the ship nor the wreckage 
has anything to do with the story, any more 
than the cream-tarts had any immediate relation 
to the Suicide Club. It is worth remark, too, 

1 R. L. S., The Pavilion on the Links. 



176 R. L. STEVENSON. 

how large a part the picturesque aspect and 
configuration of the place, the situation of the 
pavilion, and the condition of the weather play 
in the story. The setting, to say the least, is 
stronger than the love interest. 

But, in Treasure Islajid, the background is con- 
trived to admiration : here is a single instance : — 

It was one January morning, very early — a pinching 
frosty morning — the cove all grey with hoar-frost, the 
ripple lapping softly on the stones, the sun still low 
and only touching the hill-tops and shining far to 
seaward. The captain had risen earlier than usual, 
and set out down the beach, his cutlass swinging under 
the broad skirts of the old blue coat, his brass telescope 
under his arm, his hat tilted back upon his head. I 
remember his breath hanging Hke smoke in his wake 
as he strode off . . .^ 

The scene is set for imminent peril, you see; 
there is a threat in the windless, grey winter 
morning, when the old buccaneer goes down to 
keep his accustomed watch for the seafaring man 
with one leg. 

The persons of the drama, in Prince Otto, move 
amid landscape and scenery beautiful with crag 
and forest, running brooks and palaces and gar- 
dens. Prince Otto should be twice perused, once 
for the story and again for the landscape. To 

^ R. L. S., Treasure Island. 



THE LIMNER OF LANDSCAPE. 1 7/ 

endeavour to combine the two is to spoil the 
effect of both. The errant Prince, rising early, 
walks in his host's garden, and contemplates the 
tiny river runningthrough that Arcadian estate : — 

The stream was a break - neck, boiling, highland 
river. Hard by the farm, it leaped a little precipice 
in a thick grey-mare's tail of twisted filaments, and 
then lay and worked and bubbled in a lynn. Into the 
middle of this quaking pool a rock protruded, shelving 
to a cape ; and thither Otto scrambled and sat down 
to ponder. Soon the sun struck through the screen 
of branches and thin early leaves that made a hanging 
bower above the fall ; and the golden lights and flitting 
shadows fell upon and marbled the surface of that 
seething pot ; and rays plunged deep among the turn- 
ing waters ; and a spark, as bright as a diamond, lit 
upon the swaying eddy. It began to grow warm 
where Otto lingered, warm and heady; the lights 
swam, weaving their maze across the shaken pool ; on 
the impending rock, reflections danced like butterflies ; 
and the air was fanned by the waterfall as by a swinging 
curtain.'^ 

And here is a garden scene, where the Prince 
is discovered at a certain crucial moment in his 
life: — 

Thence he proceeded alone to where, in a round 
clearing, a copy of Gian Bologna's Mercury stood 
tiptoe in the twilight of the stars. The night was 
1 R. L. S., Prince Otto. 

12 



178 R. L. STEVENSON. 

warm and windless. A shaving of new moon had 
lately arisen ; but it was still too small and too low 
down in heaven to contend with the immense host of 
lesser luminaries ; and the rough face of the earth 
was drenched with starlight. Down one of the alleys, 
which widened as it receded, he could see a part of 
the lamplit terrace where a sentry silently paced, and 
beyond that a corner of the town with interlacing 
street lights. But all around him the young trees 
stood mystically blurred in the dim shine ; and in 
the stock-still quietness the up-leaping god appeared 
alive. ^ 

And here is an illustration from what is, 
perhaps, in some ways the most excellent piece 
of romantic description in Stevenson, the chapter 
in Pi'ince Otto where the discrowned Princess 
wanders by night in the forest: — 

The early evening had fallen chill, but the night was 
now temperate ; out of the recesses of the wood there 
came mild airs as from a deep and peaceful breathing ; 
and the dew was heavy on the grass and the tight- 
shut daisies. This was the girl's first night under the 
naked heaven ; and now that her fears were overpast, 
she was touched to the soul by its serene amenity and 
peace. Kindly the host of heaven blinked down upon 
that wandering Princess ; and the honest brook had 
no words but to encourage her. 

At last she began to be aware of a wonderful 
1 R. L. S., Prince Otto. 



THE LIMNER OF LANDSCAPE. 1 79 

revolution, compared to which the fire of Mittwalden 
Palace was but the crack and flash of a percussion-cap. 
The countenance with which the pines regarded her 
began insensibly to change ; the grass too, short as it 
was, and the whole winding staircase of the brook's 
course, began to wear a solemn freshness of appear- 
ance. And this slow transfiguration reached her heart, 
and played upon it, and transpierced it with a serious 
thrill. She looked all about ; the whole face of na- 
ture looked back, brimful of meaning, finger on lip, 
leaking its glad secret. She looked up. Heaven was 
almost emptied of stars. Such as still lingered shone 
with a changed and waning brightness, and began to 
faint in their stations. And the colour of the sky was 
the most wonderful ; for the rich blue of the night 
had now melted and softened and brightened ; and 
there had succeeded in its place a hue that has no 
name, and that is never seen but as the herald of 
morning. "01" she cried, joy catching at her voice, 
" O ! it is the dawn ! " ^ 

The London street scenes in Dr Jeky II 2idm\r- 
ably accord with the weird spirit of the tale. 
There is one effect of east wind which Dickens 
has also presented in his own way; and the dis- 
parity between the points of view of these two 
masters of description is worth notice. Mr 
Utterson goes to visit Dr Jekyll, and — 

It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with 
1 R. L. S., Frtiice Otto. 



l80 R. L. STEVENSON. 

a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind 
had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphan- 
ous and lawny texture. The wind made talking diffi- 
cult, and flecked the blood into the face. It seemed 
to have swept the streets unusually bare of passengers, 
besides ; for Mr Utterson thought he had never seen 
that part of London so deserted. He could have 
wished it otherwise ; never in his life had he been 
conscious of so sharp a wish to see and touch his 
fellow-creatures ; for, struggle as he might, there was 
borne in upon his mind a crushing anticipation of 
calamity. The square, when they got there, was all 
full of wind and dust, and the thin trees in the garden 
were lashing themselves along the railing.^ 

There is a menace in the air, too, in the 
opening of Chapter xii. Book I. in Our Mutual 
Friend: — 

It was not summer yet, but spring ; and it was not 
gentle spring ethereally mild, as in Thomson's Sea- 
sons, but nipping spring with an easterly wind, as in 
Johnson's, Jackson's, Dickson's, Smith's, and Jones's 
Seasons. The grating wind sawed rather than blew; 
and as it sawed the sawdust whirled about the sawpit. 
Every street was a sawpit, and there were no top- 
sawyers ; every passenger was an under-sawyer, with the 
sawdust blinding him and choking him . . . The 
wind sawed, and the sawdust whirled. The shrubs 

1 R. L. S., The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde- 
Written in i8S6. 



THE LIMNER OF LANDSCAPE. l8l 

wrung their many hands, bemoaning that they had 
been over-persuaded by the sun to bud ; the young 
leaves pined ; the sparrows repented of their early mar- 
riages, like men and women ; the colours of the rain- 
bow were discernible, not in floral spring, but in the 
faces of the people whom it nibbled and pinched . . ^ 

The just and subtle instinct of both artists 
leads them to select the particular kind of ex- 
ternal circumstances, and the particular aspect 
of them, which chime, in some indefinable way, 
with the process of events. So in TAe Master of 
Ballantrae, in the great scene of the book, the 
duel by night: — 

It was as he had said : there was no breath stirring ; 
a windless stricture of frost had bound the air ; and as 
we went forth in the shine of the candles, the black- 
ness was like a roof over our heads. Never a word 
was said ; there was never a sound but the creaking of 
our steps along the frozen path. The cold of the 
night fell about me like a bucket of water ; I shook as 
I went with more than terror ; but my companions, 
bare-headed like myself, and fresh from the warm hall, 
appeared not even conscious of the change. 

" Here is the place," said the Master. " Set down 
the candles." 

I did as he bid me, and pr&sently the flames went 
up, as steady as in a chamber, in the midst of the 

1 Charles Dickens, Gur Mutual Friend. 



1 82 R. L. STEVENSON. 

frosted trees, and I beheld these two brothers take 
their places.^ 

And so in TJie Wrecker,"^ when the schooner 
Norah Creina, driven by the gale, draws near 
the end of her voyage, and the crew of wreckers 
at last behold their prize : — 

Little by little, in that white waste of water, I began 
to make out a quarter where the whiteness appeared 
more condensed : the sky above was whitish likewise, 
and misty like a squall ; and little by little there thrilled 
upon my ears a note deeper and more terrible than 
the yelling of the gale — the long thundering roll of 
breakers. Nares wiped his night-glass on his sleeve 
and passed it to me, motioning, as he did so, with his 
hand. An endless wilderness of raging billows came 
and went and danced in the circle of the glass ; now 
and then a pale corner of sky, or the strong line of the 
horizon rugged with the heads of waves ; and then of 
a sudden — come and gone ere I could fix it, with a 
swallow's swiftness — one glimpse of what we had come 
so far and paid so dear to see ; the masts and rigging 
of a brig pencilled on heaven, with an ensign stream- 
ing at the main, and the ragged ribbons of a topsail 
thrashing from the yard. Again and again, with toilful 
searching, I recalled that apparition. There was no 
sign of any land ; the wreck stood between sea and 
sky, a thing the most isolated I had ever viewed ; but 

1 R. L. S., The Master of Ballantrae, written in 1888-89. 

2 Written in 1889-91. 



THE LIMNER OF LANDSCAPE. 1 83 

as we drew nearer, I perceived her to be defended by 
a line of breakers which drew off on either hand, and 
marked, indeed, the nearest segment of the reef. 
Heavy spray hung over them Hke a smoke, some hun- 
dred feet into the air ; and the sound of their con- 
secutive explosions rolled like a cannonade. 

And, for a last illustration, take the direct, 
romantic opening to The Beach of Falesd :^ — 

I saw that island first when it was neither night nor 
morning. The moon was to the west, setting, but still 
broad and bright. To the east, and right amidships 
of the dawn, which was all pink, the daystar sparkled 
like a diamond. The land breeze blew in our faces, 
and smelt strong of wild lime and vanilla : other things 
besides, but these were the most plain ; and the chill 
of it set me sneezing. I should say I had been for 
years on a low island near the line, living for the most 
part solitary among natives. Here was a fresh experi- 
ence : even the tongue would be quite strange to me ; 
and the look of those woods and mountains, and the 
rare smell of them, renewed my blood .^ 

Stevenson had a rare perception of romantic 
landscape; the beauty of the tangible world 
was set in his heart in the beginning, and to 
the end he rejoiced in it. 

1 Written in 1891. 

2 R. L. S., Island Nights' Entertainments. 



IX. 

HIS STYLE. 

For the foundation of style is nothing else but this : a fixed de- 
termination in any man to reveal the true nature of his thought 
as distinguished, and contra-distinguished, from the thoughts of 
all others his fellow-men, be they alive or dead. Not one of 
these shares fully the ideas that are man's; wherefore must he, 
at the beginning, be content to stand utterly alone in the world, 
until out of himself he can spin those threads which shall one 
day serve to swing him back into the thoughts of his kind. O 
awful isolation, awful incubation I O perilous flight through the 
void air ! 

That is the meaning of style. — C. F. Keary. 

There is a writer called Mr Robert Louis Stevenson, who 
makes most delicate inlay-work in black and white, and files 
out to the fraction of a hair. — Rudyard Kipling, Blackjack. 

Robert Louis Stevenson was the very type 
of the aristocrat — the ragged aristocrat — of 
letters. The crown and flower of an old tradi- 
tion, a tradition of sound scholarship, and good 
talk, and fastidious craftsmanship, a tradition 
of wine and song and story, the evolution of 
Stevenson the writer, in accordance with the com- 
mon law, left him intensely preocccupied with 



HIS STYLE. 185 

the study of form, as distinct — in so far as it may 
be distinguished — from substance. He was born 
with the single, imperious desire to make some- 
thing in words. What that something should 
consist of, was of a secondary importance; and, 
indeed, when this versatile maker came to 
the end of his life he left examples of nearly 
evQvy g-enre known to polite literature. But, at 
first, those were studies of form that absorbed 
his energies; and the direction of those studies 
is highly characteristic of the man. His choice 
of models and method of work are among the 
stock illustrations of contemporary criticism. 

It was not so much that I wished to be an author 
[he says] (though I wished that too) as that I had 
vowed that I would learn to write . . . Whenever I 
read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, 
in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with 
propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous 
force or some happy distinction in the style, I must 
sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. 
I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, 
and was again unsuccessful, and always unsuccessful ; 
but at least in these vain bouts I got some practice 
in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co- 
ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous 
ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir 
Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Mon- 
taigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann. That [he 



1 86 R. L. STEVENSON. 

adds, with finality], like it or not, is the way to learn 
to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the 
way.^ 

Well, it was undoubtedly the way, and the 
only way, for Stevenson, since he deliberately 
elected to become a perfect writer before he 
could, in the nature of things, have anything 
particular to say. Other writers, such as 
Charles Dickens and Sir Walter, began by 
amassing material, and afterwards they learned 
to shape it. But Stevenson preferred to carve 
all his patterns and prepare his moulds; and 
then he collected the raw stuff, and slowly 
poured it into a beautiful ready-made receptacle. 
It does not seem to matter which way you go 
about the business; only, there are more ways 
than the one, after all. And here there falls 
to be made another distinction : that, while the 
course of gymnastic laid down by Stevenson so 
positively may be a training essential to the man 
of letters, as such ; yet, the story-teller stands 
upon a slightly different footing. For, while 
the student, the critic, and the essayist, dealing 
largely with abstractions, may properly discourse 
of the things of their knowledge in terms of the 
study, the teller of tales, who deals directly with 

1 R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 



HIS STYLE. 187 

reality, must tell of life in the dialect of life. So 
long as the novelist express his meaning clearly 
and cleanly, the result — if he care to know it — 
will be literature. Now Stevenson, discoursing 
of flesh and blood and of actual, momentous ex- 
perience, sets forth his tale in terms of the study. 
He is never satisfied until his least phrase is ex- 
pressed in words which, irrespective of the main 
design of the piece, shall connote and suggest 
the utmost value of association or suggestion of 
which it is capable. It is possible to conceive of 
the main relation to the story of phrase or para- 
graph being taken away, and the structure still 
standing, alone and self-sufficient, like a costume 
of brocade divested by its wearer. 

But, when we take, for an instance on the 
other side, the case of old Dumas, as a master of 
narrative art, the idea of such an operation per- 
formed upon the works of Alexander is totally 
inconceivable. In order to present his theme 
with the greatest possible directness and vigour, 
he has reduced all expression to a naked, athletic 
simplicity. And so, if there be a criticism to 
offer upon Stevenson's magnificent style, it is a 
negative objection, and cavils doubtfully of a 
lack of simplicity. I say, if there be, advisedly; 
for, to a man of Stevenson's temperament, no 
other expression were adequate or possible; he 



1 88 R. L. STEVENSON. 

painted as he saw; and to deprecate his style, 
is to find fault with Stevenson as God made 
him, with the artist as his most earnest toil 
improved his natural gifts. And, if his purely 
narrative works lose, considered from one point 
of view, from a superfluity of beautiful vesture, 
looked at from another, the same quality adds 
vastly to the pleasure of their perusal. It is 
only upon general grounds that we may take 
exception; for a perfect and sufficient rule for 
the artist has never yet been established, during 
immemorial centuries; nor may Robert Louis 
Stevenson go down to posterity as the exponent 
of the one infallible method. 

Nevertheless, his influence upon the writers of 
his generation is both active and salutary. Even 
the journalist is affected ; and there is scarce a 
newspaper of repute but unconsciously pays its 
daily tribute to the aristocracy of letters, in a 
picked word here and there, or the turn of a 
phrase, which were first legitimatised by Steven- 
son. Generously gifted, not only with a fine 
sense and love of words, of their colour and 
value but, with the faculty of heroical industry, 
Stevenson (in the famous phrase) wrote like an 
angel. 

Consider his many volumes, in all their vari- 
ety; and a hundred different harmonies, ingeni- 



HIS STYLE. 189 

ous rhythms, nimble combinations and subtle 
contrasts of colour, apt and witty epithets, chime 
in the memory : — 

Look at one of your industrious fellows for a mo- 
ment, I beseech you . . . Either he absents him- 
self entirely from all fellowship, and lives a recluse in 
a garret, with carpet slippers a?id a leaden inkpot ; or 
he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a con- 
traction of his whole nervous system, to discharge 
some temper before he returns to work.^ 

The victim begins to shrink spiritually ; he develops 
a fancy for parlours with a regulated temperature, and 
takes his morality on the principle of tin shoes and 
tepid milk. The care of one important body or soul 
becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the outer 
world begin to come thin and faint into the parlour 
with the regulated temperature ; and the tin shoes go 
equably forward over blood and rain?' 

"It is true," replied Vandeleur. "I have hunted 
most things, /"r^w men and women down to mosquitoes ; 
I have dived for coral ; I have followed both whales and 
tigers ; and a diamond is the tallest quarry of the loty^ 

A little before sundown in an open place with a 
stream, and set about with barbarous mountains, Bal- 
lantrae threw down his pack. " I will go no farther," 
said he, and bade me light the fire, damning my blood 
in terms not proper for a chainnan.^ 

^ R. L. S., Virginibus Puerisque. ^ Ibid. 

8 R. L. S., New Arabian Nights. 
* R. L. S., Master of Ballantrae. 



igO R. L. STEVENSON. 

The browsers, the biters, the barkers, the hairy 
coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the 
thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share 
with us the gift of life, share with us the love of the 
ideal . , . Even while they look, even while they 
repent, the foot of man treads thetn by thousands in the 
dust, the yelping hounds burst upon their trail, the bullet 
speeds, the k?iives are heating in the den of the vivisec- 
tionist ; or the dew falls, ajid the generation of a day is 
blotted out} 

By means of the artful juxtaposition of words, 
these phrases I have italicised (and there are 
many hundreds more, for Stevenson wrought his 
web with prodigal magnificence) reflect, like 
crystals, beams and colours from all sorts of 
moving images, from the dust beneath our feet, 
to the vault of heaven and remotest constella- 
tions. Out of his studies in the English classics, 
Stevenson taught his generation new lessons in 
the plastic qualities of prose diction.'^ 

And consider the talk of the men and women 

1 R. L. S., Later Essays. 

2 In this connection, it is curious to recall a passage in Ben 
Jonson's Timber or Discoveries, &c. : " What a deal of cold busi- 
ness doth a man mis-spend the better part of life in ! in scattering 
compliments, tendering visits, gathering and venting news, follow- 
ing feasts and plays, making a little winter-love in a dark corner." 
This was read aloud to Stevenson by a friend, who asked him 
when he had written it ; whereupon Stevenson, in all good faith, 
protested that he had wholly forgotten the passage, and desired 
to know where in his works it occurred. 



HIS STYLE. 191 

in his books; it is not only appropriate but in- 
spired. Recall, for instance, the conversation 
of the pirates in Treasure Island. Piracy is a 
black, revolting business in reality (compare, 
for example, Stevenson's own account of the 
Teach affair in The Master of Ballantrae) ; and 
yet, while the talk of these romantic scoun- 
drels is nothing else but quintessential piracy, 
it remains wholly delightful. That is the privi- 
lege of true romantic art — to seize and present 
the essential element in things which makes for 
delight. So in all his books : this Prometheus 
has stolen fire from heaven and gifted his crea- 
tions with the gift of tongues. It is upon record 
that he was himself a chief among talkers, as 
befitted a scion of Old Scotland's aristocracy 
of wit. And did he not write the essay on Talk 
and Talkers^} an achievement of its kind. And 
Stevenson, like Thackeray, owns, not only the 
distinction of an executant but, the mastery of 
dialogue, clean, athletic, eloquent, witty, and 
picturesque. 

But Stevenson's most notable achievements as 
an executant were, perhaps, his Dedications. 
It is upon record that Thomas Stevenson, when 
all books failed him, as books will fail us all 
at times, would take down the volumes of his 

^ R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 



192 R. L. STEVENSON. 

son and read the Dedications therein. These, 
at least, never, to the last day of his life, failed 
to give him the same pleasure. Since Ben 
Jonson wrote, there have been no better examples 
of this form of composition, made up, as the 
perfect Dedication must be, of tact, delicacy, 
eloquence, and cunning craftsmanship. 

Take Virginihis Puerisgue, and read the first 
(and, perhaps — who can say ? — the best) of the 
many Stevensonian Dedications, beginning: — 

My dear William Ernest Henley, We ai-e all 
busy in this world building Towers of Babel; and the 
child of our imaginations is always a changeling when 
it comes from nurse. This not only true in the greatest, 
as of wars and folios, but in the least also, like the 
trifling volume in your hand . . . 

And: — 

Times change, opinions vary to their opposite, and 
still this world appears a brave gytnnasiu7n, full of 
sea-bathing, and horse-exercise, and bracing, manly vir- 
tues ; and what can be more encouraging than to find 
the friend who was welcome at one age, still welcome at 
another? Our affections and beliefs are wiser than 
we ; the best that is in us is better than we can under- 
stand; for it is grounded beyond experience, and guides 
us, blindfold but safe, from one age to another. 

Or the Dedication of The Merry Men, dated 



HIS STYLE. 193 

from the author's house, Skerryvore, in Bourne- 
mouth : — 

To your name, if I wrote on brass, I could add 
nothing; it has already been written higher than I 
could dream to reach, by a strong and dear hand ; and 
if I now dedicate to you these tales, it is not as the 
writer who brings you his work, but as the friend who 
would remind you of his affection. 

Or the Dedication of Travels with a Donkey in 
the Cevennes, to Sidney Colvin, which is a little 
rhapsody in praise of friendship, finished, elegant ; 
or, prefixed to The Master of Ballantrae : — 

A dedication from a great way off : written by the 
lone shores of a subtropical island near upon ten 
thousand miles from Boscombe Chine and Manor : scenes 
which rise before me as I write, along with the faces 
and voices of my friends. 

And, last of all, take the Dedication of Catriona, 
To Charles Baxter, Writer to the Signet, written at 
Vailima, Upolu, Samoa, 1892 (two years before 
the author's death), ending thus: — 

You are still — as when first I saw, as when I last 
addressed you — in the wiener able city which I must 
always think of as my home. Aftd I have come so 
far,' and the sights and thoughts of tny youth pursue 
me ; and I see like a vision the youth of tny father, 
13 



194 R- L. STEVENSON. 

and of his father^ and the whole stream of lives flowing 
down there far in the north, with the sound of laughter 
and tears, to cast me out in the end, as by a sudden 
freshet, on these ultimate islands. And I admire and 
bow my head before the romance of destitiy. 



X. 

EPILOGUE. 

Madam Life's a piece in bloom 

Death goes dogging everywhere : 
She's the tenant of the room, 

He's the ruffian on the stair. 

You shall see her as a friend, 

You shall bilk him once and twice ; 

But he'll trap you in the end, 
And he'll stick you for her price. 

With his kneebones at your chest, 

And his knuckles in your throat. 
You would reason — plead — protest! 

Clutching at her petticoat ; 

But she's heard it all before, 

Well she knows you've had your fun. 

Gingerly she gains the door, 
And your little job is done. 

— W. E. Henley, Echoes. 

Destiny is the last word in the life of every 
man. None may escape the thousand inherited 
impulses that mingle in his blood, nor avoid 
the irresistible influences of the time and place 
and society into which he is born. And Robert 
Louis Stevenson, the last, as I have tried to 
show, of a long tradition, the last heir to a 



196 R. L. STEVENSON. 

rich inheritance, followed the ancient habit of 
his race, learned his elements in old Edina, 
changing then before his eyes to the Edinburgh 
we know, and went to France and learned what 
he might of an astute nation, and returned to 
Scotland, and again went forth and wandered 
the earth, and settled at length in an island 
of the far seas, and became (they say) a kind 
of feudal chieftain, and died there, leaving 
behind him a monument to the honour of his 
native city, which he loved. 

And as Stevenson was the last expression of the 
old Scottish aristocracy of letters which had its 
home in Edinburgh for many generations, so the 
monument of his works is the cenotaph of that 
polite, illustrious society. A born artist, self- 
conscious to his finger-tips, witty, sensitive, 
sardonically humorous, endowed with a subtle 
insight and inheriting an incomparable faculty 
of craftsmanship, he loved art and letters, 
metaphysic and talk, and all the lusty gifts 
and magnificent appearances of life, with his 
whole heart. Of the passion of love he seems to 
have conceived imperfectly and partially, until 
he drew towards the end of his life, when — it 
seems — he came near to beholding some image 
of the true Eros. Constantly aflflicted with ill- 
health, a fighting spirit of indomitable courage 



EPILOGUE. 197 

carried him triumphantly through troubles and 
incredible labours, until, in middle age, we see 
him (in his Vailima Letters) desperately and 
cheerfully toiling for reasons (apparently) like 
to those which compelled Sir Walter Scott to 
his pathetic sacrifice, and labouring with a 
heroism which brings to mind his august elder's 
demeanour in the last tragic scenes of his life. 

But, with all Stevenson's brilliant endowment 
and all his amazing cleverness, the sane, serenely 
humorous vision of the great masters is denied 
him. Stevenson was no " natural force let loose." 
Rather was he the very type of the athlete in 
letters, with all his powers cultivated to their 
utmost, informed with a rare and brave spirit, 
running — with many flourishes and tricks of 
pace — the race that was set before him with 
all his might. 

The portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson has 
been drawn in little by a stronger hand than 
mine, in the lines at the beginning of this vol- 
ume. Therein you shall behold the picture 
of a man gifted with an endowment exquisite 
yet strangely incomplete, who won great re- 
nown in his brief lifetime as a beautiful and 
refined artist, an admirable executant. 



INDEX. 



Across the Plains, 66. 

Admiral Guinea, 62. 

Amateur Emigrant, The, ^2, 54, 

57. 173- 
Arabian Nights, The New, 51. 

63, \-^2etseq., 157, i8g. 
Autumn Effect, An, 168. 

BeachofFalesd, The, 73,112,183. 

Beau Austin, 62. 

Black Arrow, The, 61, 14I, 155. 

Black Canyon, The, 56. 

Black, M. M., R. L. Stevenson, 

by, 49. 
Body Snatcher, The, 63. 
Bottle Imp, The, 70, T^^. 
Burfis, Essay on, Henley's, 2, 8. 
Burns, The Merrie Muses of 

Caledonia, collected by, 2. 
Burt, Edward, Letters, by, 5. 

Catriona, 76, 140, 193. 
Chapter on Dreams, A, 2S. 
Child's Garden of Verses, A, 28, 

62, 63, 116 (?/ seq. 
Child's Play, 28. 
Christmas Sermon, A, 99. 
Colvin, Sidney, art. "R. L. S." 

in D. N. B., by, z%, 33, 40, 43, 

54. 65, 78. 

Deacon Brodie, 30, 51, 63. 
Dynamiters, The, 158. 

Ebb-Tide, The,-](>, Ii2, 163, 165. 



Edinburgh Days, R. L. Steven- 
son's, by E. B. Simpson, 23, 

29, 30. 39. 45- 
Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes on, 

8-12. 
Edinburgh University Magazine, 

45- 

Engineers, A Family of, 13 ^/ 
seq., 17 et seq., 76, II2. 

Epilogue to An Inland Voyage,^. 

Essays and Fragments, 23. 

Essays, Later, 43, 46, 70, 96, 98, 
loi, 108, 114, 190. 

Essays Speculative and Sugges- 
tive, J. A. Symonds's, 167. 

Fables, 79, 102 et seq., 106. 
Faith, Half-Faith, and No Faith 

at all, 102, 104. 
Familiar Studies of Men and 

Boo'ks, 46, 51, 125. 
Fatnily of Engineers, A, i^ et 

seq., 17 et seq., 76, 1 12. 
Fergusson, Robert, The Daft 

Days, by, 7. 
Fleemitig Jenkin, Memoir of, 34, 

48, 65. 
Fontatnebleau, 46. 
Footnote to History, A, 75, 82. 

Garden of Verses, A Child's, 28, 

62, 63, \i6 et seq. 
Great North Road, The, 63, 160 

et seq. 
Guy Mannering, 2, 4. 



200 



INDEX. 



Heathercat, 76. 

Henley, W. E., Essay on Burns, 
by, 2, 8 — biographical foot- 
note by, 43, 49. 

History of Moses, A, 28. 

House of Eld, The, 102, 103. 

In the South Seas, 70, 72. 
Inland Voyage, An, 50, 86, 95, 

172. 
Island Nights' Entertainments, 

183. 

Juvenilia, 60, 67, 84, 96, 168 et 
seq. 

Kidnapped, 64, 140. 

Later Essays, 43, 46, 70, 96, 98, 

loi, 108, 114, 190. 
Lay Morals, 52, 96. 
Letter to a Young Gentleman, 

&c., 108 et seq., 113. 
Letters, Burt's, 5. 
Letters from Samoa, 75. 
Lodging for the Night, A, 51, 

129. 

Manse, The, 28. 

Markheim, 63, 143. 

Master of Ballanirae, 66, 73, 141, 

145, 181, 189, 191, 193. 
Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, 34, 

48, 65. 
Memories and Portraits, \t, et 

seq., 21, 33, 34, 38, 39, 45, 

85 et seq., 125, 150, 166, 186, 

191. 
Merry Men, The, 18, 57, 137, 

192. 
Misadventures of John Nicholson, 

63. 143- 
Moral Emblems, 56. 
Morality of the Profession of 

Letters, 108. 

New Arabian Nights, The, 51, 

63, 132 et seq., 157, 189. 
Not I, and other Poems, 56. 



Olalla, 63, 143. 

Old Mortality, 65. 

Opeti Letter to Dr Hyde, 70, 73. 

Pavilion on the Links, The, 54, 

152, 175- 
Pentland Rising, The, 39, 42. 
Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh, 

8-12. 
Pritice Otto, 54, 62, 63, 145, 160, 

176, 177 et seq. 
Providence and the Guitar, 51, 

151- 
Pulvts et Umbra, 96, 97, 99. 

Raleigh, W. A., R. L. Stevenson, 

by, 106, 126, 149. 
Ramsay, Allan, " Elegy on 

Maggy Johnston," 5. 
Randovi Memories, 28, 32. 
Roads, essay on, 46. 
Robert Macaire, 64. 

Schwob, M. Marcel, criticism of 
Stevenson by, 10, 130. 

Scott, Guy Mannering, 2, 4. 

Silverado Squatters, The, 55. 

Simpson, E. B., Stevenson's 
Edinburgh Days, by, 23, 29, 

30. 39. 45- 
Sirede Malitroifs Door, The, 51, 

1 29 et seq. 
So7nething in It, 105. 
Songs of Travel, 73, 122. 
South Sea Letters, 74-76. 
Stevenson, R. L., Memoir by 

M.M. Black, 49 — Monograph 

by Professor Raleigh, 106, 126, 

149 — Marcel Schwob on, 130. 
St Ives, 78. 

Story of a Lie, The, 152. 
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and 

Mr Hyde, The, 64, 142, 179. 
Symonds, J. A., Essays Specula- 

tive and Suggestive, by, 167. 

Talk and Talkers, 44, 191. 
Thrawn Janet, 57, 137. 
Ticonderoga, 65. 



INDEX. 



201 



Travels in Perth, 28. 

Travels with a Donkey in the 

Cevemies, 50, 86, 95, 193. 
Treasure Island, 23, 57, 60, 61, 

126, 140, 141, 153, 176. 
Treasure of Franchard, 61, 79) 

80, 93. 

Underwoods, 62, 115. 

Vailima Letters, 40, 74, 77, 82, 

in, 125, 197. 
Virginibus Puerisque, 49, 50, 85 

et seq., 100, 189, 192. 
Voces Fidelium, 38. 



Weir of Hermiston, 76, 78, 113, 

148, 164, 165. 
Will d" the Mill, 51, 80, 89 et 

seq., 131. 
Wreath of Immortelles, The, 42, 

82. 
Wrecker, The, 46, 68, 74, 76, 158, 

182. 
Wrong Box, The, 66, 141, 144. 



Yellow Paint, The, 102, 103. 
Young Chevalier, The, 76, 146. 



3W7-7 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: May 2009 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATIOI 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 



